COLD WAR SHOOTOUT
U.S. defeats Russia at world juniors
Two years ago this week, approaching the close of a world junior hockey championship that had seen surprisingly poor attendance in its Montreal leg, Tom Renney was asked if high ticket prices were to blame.
“That’s a great question,” the Hockey Canada chief executive responded. “I can’t answer that.” It would seem they still cannot. This year’s version of the world juniors, back in Montreal and Toronto just two years after the last time, has the bad-attendance story back and then some, with the great swaths of empty seats now having been extended to the round-robin games in Toronto and even the elimination contests involving Team Canada, where the quarter-final win over the Czechs on Monday didn’t approach a sellout. If Canada doesn’t get past the Swedes in the semifinal on Wednesday, the gold-medal game will almost certainly have thousands of empty seats, given that even the cheap tickets are close to $100 each. Even if Canada does get to the final, a sellout is no lock at those prices. As of Wednesday morning, it was harder (and cheaper) to find an empty seat for next Monday’s game at the Bell Centre between the Montreal Canadiens and the Washington Capitals.
This is not what hockey officials had in mind when they took the world juniors, which had gone through a steady upward progression of market size in Canada, and plunked them in the hockey jewels of the country’s centre for the 2015 and 2017 editions of the tournament. When the decision was announced in 2013, it felt like Hockey Canada and the IIHF, having reaped ever-larger profits as the event moved from smaller cities like Halifax and Regina to NHL markets like Calgary and Edmonton, decided to shoot for the moon with the Toronto-Montreal editions. Instead, it now feels like they shot themselves somewhere else entirely.
Excuses for the weak showing for the tournament in the hockey cathedrals include the high prices — which is fair, particularly when neither of the host cities is much of a junior hockey town and fans are likely surprised to learn they have to pay the same amount to see Slovak teens as they do to see Sidney Crosby. But the excuses this time around have included Toronto’s crowded sports schedule over the past couple of years, which have included the first world juniors, a World Cup of Hockey, an NBA all-star game, a Grey Cup, an MLS Cup and four playoff runs between the Blue Jays and the Raptors. Three of those events — the World Cup, the Grey Cup and this world juniors — had varying levels of attendance problems. On their own, each event’s empty seats have raised questions — Was the World Cup too contrived? Will Toronto never again be a good CFL market? — and as a whole have caused some to question Toronto’s merit as a sports town.
That latter question should be a non-starter: the Jays, Raptors and Leafs all draw strong crowds and more than 30,000 tickets for Toronto FC’s MLS Cup sold out in minutes. The city’s fans will clearly come out in droves for events they actually care about.
But the problems with ticket sales at some of these marquee events point to the fundamental way in which the buying and selling of sports tickets has changed — and the ways in which organizers have been slow to catch on. For years, multi-week events like the world juniors used the premium games at the end to leverage sales at the start: You have to buy 19 games to ensure a ticket to the gold-medal final, that kind of thing. This worked fine when it was very difficult to find tickets once there was little left through the box office, but the rise of the secondary market has put much of the leverage back in the public’s hands. There are plenty of good tickets available through secondary-market sites like StubHub for Thursday’s gold-medal game in Montreal, and many of them at close to face value. If you are a Montrealer who was potentially interested in seeing Canada in the medal round, there was little reason to buy round-robin tickets to everything from Sweden-Finland to Switzerland-Denmark to guarantee yourself a seat at the tournament’s later stages. There was always a good chance that you could get seats at a decent price as Canada advanced into the medal round.
At the World Cup, tickets were similarly sold in strips — multigame groups — which helped boost overall sales but left many thousands of sold-but-unused tickets for some low-demand non-Canada games. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman bragged in September that the high level of overall sales was proof that multi-game packages were the right call, which is true if you don’t mind half-empty arenas for a lot of games. The secondary market was surely a factor in the Grey Cup’s embarrassing walkback from its initial sky-high prices. There was no clamour to snap up tickets from the box office when you could wait to see what was dumped on the reseller sites. (The answer: lots of tickets.)
As organizers consider the pricing strategy for future world juniors — the one in Buffalo, N.Y., next year that now seems like much less of a hot ticket and the one in Vancouver and Victoria a year later — they would be wise to consider selling tickets for high-demand games at one price and those for the lesser games at one much lower. The same goes for an event like the World Cup, if it happens again. You used to be able to convince lots of people to buy tickets they didn’t want to ensure they could get those they did, but the public seems awfully wise to that racket now.