If you plan on going to a meaningful Green Bay Packers game at Lambeau Field this year, it’s going to cost you an extra $15-17 per ticket.
The Packers have raised ticket prices for the seventh consecutive season. If there’s any good news, it’s that they’ve actually lowered ticket prices for preseason games substantially.
Here’s the breakdown.
Regular season tickets
- End zone: increased from $80 to $95
- South end zone, 700 level: increased from $89 to $105
- End zone to 20: increased from $92 to $108
- South end zone, 600 level: increased from $96 to $112
- Between the 20s: increased from $105 to $122
Preseason tickets
- End zone: decreased from $80 to $45
- South end zone, 700 level: decreased from $89 to $50
- End zone to 20: decreased from $92 to $53
- South end zone, 600 level: decreased from $96 to $57
- Between the 20s: decreased from $105 to $62
If you’re a Green Bay season ticket holder, the overall increase is from $55 to $59. If you’re a Milwaukee season ticket holder, your overall cost actually decreases between $5 and $9.
The Packers are presenting this as a nice, tidy 5 percent increase in ticket prices.
However, if like most people, you don’t care about preseason games, it’s actually a much more substantial increase. For example, if you paid $80 per game last year to sit in the end zone, your ticket prices for regular season games just went up nearly 19 percent.
We get it.
People don’t want to pay top dollar to watch a bunch of scrubs play during the preseason. Lowering those ticket prices was the right thing to do. You can’t charge a premium price for a subpar version of your product.
However, we suspect raising regular season ticket prices to a starting point of $95 prices a lot of fans and most families right out of seeing a meaningful game in person.
The Packers will — and did — frame this as a decision based on fairness and competitiveness.
“We project this will place us 19th in average ticket price, just below the overall NFL average, the benchmark we use annually to help us determine pricing,” said president and CEO Mark Murphy in a brochure sent to season ticket holders. “We feel that position reflects a great value for the gameday experience at Lambeau Field and also allows us to maintain a fair visiting team share for our NFL partners.”
That’s all well and good, but that statement is typical Murphy tone deaf spin.
The Packers have the fourth-largest seating capacity in the NFL. They’re the 29th most-valuable sports franchise in the world. They’re going to be worth substantially more when the Titletown District is running at full speed.
They simply don’t need to gouge their fans with higher ticket prices and yet, it’s an annual occurrence.