‘I want to know what I’m paying for’
Outraged season-ticket holders force company to push first payment due date to June 8
It’s been an unusually hectic week for the folks who work in the ticket office at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.
As if the pandemic putting pro sports on hold wasn’t bad enough, on Tuesday they were faced with a tsunami of angry backlash from season-ticket holders of the Maple Leafs and Raptors. This was in reaction to a Monday memo informing subscribers the first payment for the 2020-21 regular season would be due as early as Friday. Never mind that the NHL and NBA haven’t yet decided the fate of the 2019-20 season. Never mind that the precise start day of the 2020-21 season remains a theoretical notion, with many experts insisting large gatherings will be unlikely until 2021 at the earliest. As of Tuesday, the Leafs and Raptors were set to demand about 23 per cent of the bill for next season’s seats, no matter that nobody knows when next season might begin.
Let’s just say many seasonticket holders, who’d long ago come to grips with pre-coronavirus ticket-price increases ranging from six per cent to nine per cent, were not thrilled to hear this.
“It’s so insensitive. I just find it appalling,” Angelo Nasato, who’s owned Leafs seats going back to Maple Leaf Gardens, said Tuesday. “They’re showing total disregard toward the paying fans.”
“Pretty much everyone is outraged,” said another seasonticket holder who owns multiple season seats for both teams and spent Tuesday monitoring the mood of the seasonticket community on social media.
The outrage was strong enough, apparently, to push MLSE to make an adjustment on the fly.
“We had a small group of unhappy members that didn’t think we were listening,” said Jeff Deline, MLSE’s chief revenue officer. “So we stayed up pretty much all night (Tuesday) night and worked on the plan.”
By Wednesday morning, MLSE had revised its policy, and not for the first time. The first payment for 2020-21 seats had previously been due on April 8. But when fans complained, that date was revised to May 8. Now, the company has told members in an email that went out around noon Wednesday that the first instalment is due June 8, at least for now.
“The goal here is trying to put members first every single day,” Deline said. “Honestly, this is one of the hardest things we’ve had to figure out and deal with. These are not normal circumstances.”
To be fair, under normal circumstances the Leafs and Raptors normally process first payments for the following season’s seats as early as March, said Tom McDonald, MLSE’s vice-president of ticket sales and service. This week, both teams announced the unprecedented step of issuing credits for unplayed games from the 2019-20 campaign, a move that was well received judging from interviews with multiple season-ticket holders. The Leafs have seven home games remaining; the Raptors have nine. And while those games haven’t officially been cancelled, the company said the money from them can be applied to the first payment on next season’s seats. If members select that option, they’ve been informed their first payment now won’t be due until June 28.
Under the current plan, most season-ticket holders will be expected to pay about 30 per cent of their 2020-21 bill by the end of June, with the remaining 70 per cent billed in increments of seven per cent over the following 10 months. In a regular year, McDonald said, most accounts are 50 per cent paid by the end of June.
“Things are changing so quickly,” McDonald said. “We’re doing the best we can to prepare for what we know today, but also provide flexibility and, frankly, empathy for what’s going on in the world right now.”
Is deferring first payments until June 8 the requisite amount of empathy at a moment of economic struggle? Reaction on social media suggested it was a welcome move. But some members were left wondering why there’s a rush to pay when we’re a long way from knowing when either team will play.
“I have no problem paying. I just want to know what I’m paying for,” Nasato said Wednesday. “Why aren’t we deferring until we actually know something (about when the 2020-21 season might actually begin)?”
Said one Raptors season-seat holder: “(The policy) really should be: We’re suspending payments indefinitely until there is more clarity from the NBA regarding next season.”
Richard Peddie, the former CEO of MLSE who retired in 2012, estimated that the Leafs and Raptors combine to generate something in the neighbourhood of $200 million in annual regular-season ticket revenue, with about 80 per cent coming from seasonticket holders. In other words, deferring payments leaves a boatload of money lying in limbo. Still, Peddie described the May 8 deadline as “ballsy” and didn’t seem convinced June 8 was a sufficient alternative. He suggested it might be fairer to adopt a billing model used during his time as CEO, albeit during the playoffs, wherein the company was authorized to charge the credit cards of members for games certain to be played.
“At a moment like this I think (MLSE) wants certainty: Are these people with us? But it’s tough for people to say ‘We’re with you,’ because they don’t know if there’s even going to be a season,” Peddie said. “And as we’re seeing in research, there are high, high numbers of people saying, ‘I have no desire to go back into a building with 20,000 or 50,000 people anytime soon.’ ”
Both Deline and McDonald said it’s standard practice for MLSE to accept payment for the following season before the current one is completed, and long before the schedule has been finalized. And both said they’ve been buoyed by recent signs of hope. Some Ontario businesses are getting set to open. There’s a plan to allow limited access to NBA practice facilities as early as Friday, although it remains to be seen when the Raptors will be permitted to fire up shots at the OVO Athletic Centre.
“I think, as an optimist, (pro sports is) going back the other way where we’ll be more in demand than ever,” Deline said. “I don’t think anybody is predicting that the leagues are shutting down and going away … We will play an openingnight Leafs games and an opening-night Raptors game.”
Exactly when those games will arrive, nobody knows. Which is to say, it’s a decent bet that this particular hectic week at the MLSE ticket office might not be the last one.
“I think we have to listen and prepare for any scenario that might come up,” Deline said.
In other words, June 8 doesn’t appear to be etched in stone.
“I think we’re going to continue to monitor it,” Deline said. “I think we’re hoping for good news.”