The Bursting Bubble
January 11, 2024
Recently, one of my Facebook friends posted that he was seeking to unload a pair of upper-deck tickets to see the former Atlanta Thrashers franchise that Manitoba taxpayers were forced to purchase for Mark Chipman. At the face value of $573, he found no takers. If I still lived in Winnipeg, I wouldn’t go to one of those games if he paid me $573. In fact, the only reply he got was from someone who was looking to unload even more Chipman tickets. Apparently the team has been winning, but though it is normally a great deodorant, there isn’t enough deodorant in the entire country to mask the stench of an owner who has been treating his customers like dirt for a dozen years. Not to mention the fact that precious few in that part of the world can afford such luxuries. And with a newly elected NDP government in Manitoba, that number will only go down.
When I was a Jets season ticket holder in the mid-1980s, the face value of the upper deck seat I held for four years was $10.50. I could pay cash, receive a paper ticket (smartphones didn’t even exist, let alone being required to get you in the door) and though I could hardly say my patronage was appreciated, I could still walk through the front door without being wanded, frisked and humiliated by a bunch of burly goons badly in need some extra strength Ex-Lax.
Oh, how times have changed.
Yes, things have gone up over the years. Way up. But they haven’t gone up that much. It’s yet another example as to how pro sports, and the NHL specifically, has long since priced itself out of the reach of Joe Fan.
There’s a bubble coming, especially in Canada, a nation suffering under economic attack from its own government. It’s coming along slowly, but make no mistake, it’s coming.
It’s not going to be felt terribly hard in places like Toronto or Vancouver. But it will be felt much more deeply in smaller markets. That’s where the bubble will burst first.
Markets like Winnipeg. The smallest of them all.
Where an annual stipend of $15 million from the government still isn’t enough to keep the lights on.
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