Following the report that the Buffalo Bills will make $78 million for playing eight games in Toronto over the next five years, it should come as no surprise that tickets in Toronto will cost a lot more money than tickets in Buffalo.
The Buffalo News reports that sideline seats from the end zones to the 20-yard lines will cost $295 a game, and seats between the 20-yard lines will be more expensive than that, with exact prices to be revealed next week.
The average ticket price for Bills games at Toronto’s Rogers Centre will be well over $200, far higher than the average ticket price at Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson Stadium, which is $51.24, the News reports. Ralph Wilson Stadium seats about 20,000 more people than the Rogers Centre, but the bottom line is still significantly more ticket revenue in Toronto than the Bills can make in Buffalo.
Despite the prices, demand is high enough that tens of thousands of fans are expected to buy the full eight-game package for admission to every game in Toronto over the next five years. The eight-game package offers a discount, with $295 seats going for $270. Bills and Toronto Argonauts season-ticket holders have first dibs on tickets, with the remaining tickets going to randomly selected fans who registered online.
Starting with this year’s preseason, the Bills will play preseason games in Toronto every other year and regular-season games every year through 2012. Although it’s impossible to say what economic conditions will look like five years from now, it’s hard not to think that in the future, Toronto will host even more Bills games.
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May 8th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Before anyone points out that these prices are in Canadian dollars, it should be noted that the Canadian dollar is almost at par with the American dollar these days.
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Rating: 3.65 / 5 with 3 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Holy price-gouge batman!
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 2 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Anyone who willingly pays that much money to go to a Bills game is a Canucklehead.
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Rating: 4.7 / 5 with 7 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Wow, everything costs more in Canada. I work in auto sales and recently priced out an American spec Eclipse for a customer in the $24,000 range. That same car in Canada is over $30,000. And I thought the Canadian Dollar actually passed the American Dollar in value recently…I could be wrong.
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Rating: 4 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
It appears they named their currency after the people, because they have to be looney to pay that kind of coin
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Rating: 3.5 / 5 with 2 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Thats a lot of money to pay to watch a really, really, really boring football team. Of course Toronto is a big city. Are these prices in line with the bigger cities like NY and Chicago? If so, I don’t see anything wrong with those prices at all.
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Rating: 4 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
It’s the price we pay for our health care and social welfare systems - heavily taxed…
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I think we’ll see a canadian NFL team sooner rather than later..
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May 8th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
When the Bills become the Toronto Bills in 2013, I don’t think they will get that much per ticket with 10 home games. But I do think the average ticket price will be far higher than the lowest ticket price in the league like the Bills are.
BTW, I give 2010 as the over/under for a formal announcement of the Bills moving permanently to Toronto and the building of a new stadium.
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
This sucks. This is going to drive ticket prices up for everyone else. Trust Ted Rogers to cut out the middle man and go ahead and charger scalper-prices for regular seats.
Why would I pay $200 for a seat to watch a game in a stadium where tailgating is illegal?
Dumb.
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I would like to know who this will affect the players tax situation? They will now need to file both a US and Canadian tax return and with Canada’s universal healthcare…. i would assume their taxes income tax rate will be higher.
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
If the Bills can get people to pay for it than great. That means its far less likely for them to leave that area. Buffalo itself as I understand it is fairly depressed economically but they can play a few games there for prices appropriate for that area and make a ton of money just by traveling not so far away and keeping that home field advantage is the perfect situation. Let the Bills stay in that area. If LA wants a team let them have the Jags. They’re a really good team but still can’t sell out there games legitimately.
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
This due to the US$ sucking wind. It’s about the exchange rate, not gouging.
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May 8th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
The Canadian dollar has been running within $.02-.03 of the US dollar for the past 6 months, and within $.10 for the past year. The difference is negligible.
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
i live outside daytwa and have been to canuckistan, altho not recently.
they have taxes like ours, except a little higher. then they have the VAT (value added tax).
that will get you the difference. right now the $ and loonie are near par.
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Take a look at we crazy Torontonians pay to watch the Maple Leafs. And they have a long, storied history of being terrible…and they play 40+ home games.
Once you can appreciate that, you won’t be thinking that the amount we’ll pay for a handful of Bills games is that outrageous from our perspectives.
If they ever move here, I expect we’ll need a new stadium and any decrease in price from $250 will be offset by seat licence costs.
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Apparently Canadian bankers still have lots of cash leftover even after losing a couple of million to Michael Vick.
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May 8th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
gibson: Or how about a team that has sold fewer tickets than the Jags consistently over the past four years, like maybe Dallas or Indy? Surely, if the Jaguars can’t sell out legitimately, but still sell more tickets than those moribund franchises, maybe *THEY* should be the ones to move.
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Rating: 2 / 5 with 2 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Uh….The current U.S. dollar buys 1.01 Canadian dollars. Canada is not Great Britain, this is simply gouging based on higher expected demand from Canadians who want to see football.
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Have I missed the outcry of Bills fans over losing a home game a year? Or was there never one to begin with?
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Rating: 5 / 5 with 1 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Why don’t they just move the team and get it over with? Buffalos got their Sabres, they’ll be fine.
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May 8th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
So in Buffalo you can sit through 4 games for the same price as a Canadian sitting through 1 game. Who ultimately is the smarter fan?
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May 8th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
the thing is, making money in Toronto makes the Bills more viable in Buffalo. If they didn’t have grander markets to tap, then the future of the franchise would be a lot more bleak. There are also a lot of people with a lot of money that don’t want to see the team leave Buffalo. Also there is great resistance to having an NFL franchise in Canada on the part of Canadians who fear that it will ruin the CFL, which is in its own right a very successful football league.
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Rating: 4.5 / 5 with 2 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Jacksonville grew by 7000 people in the first quarter of 2008 (despite a poor market), was recently rated #3 in respect to emerging IT markets by Forbes magazine and will soon be recognized as the third largest port on the eastern seaboard behind NYC and Newport News. Yeah, they’ve had some struggles selling out the stadium (partly because many people who live there also have season tickets to the Gators, Seminoles or Georgia Bulldogs), but Buffalo has been a shrinking market for at least a decade! Jags owner, Wayne Weaver, has deflected talk of selling the team year in and year out despite articles written to the contrary by douchebags like Michael Silver. Ralph Wilson was smart to make this move just like he was smart to vote “NO” on the recent CBA. Moving games to Toronto could be just what he needs to keep the team in Buffalo. But insinuating they are in better shape than Jacksonville is just not true. The Jags are entering their 14th season in Jacksonville. First generation Jags fans are just now becoming old enough to pay for their own tickets. I’m on record as saying “F” the bid to bring a team to LA because they have proven they cannot sustain a team despite having at least 8 million more citizens than markets like Green Bay, Buffalo, Jacksonville and Cincinnati. Ralph Wilson made this move out of utter desperation, but it will infuse new money into the franchise. It’s a temporary fix though unless he agrees to play half his schedule in Toronto or someone strikes gold or oil in the greater Buffalo area.
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Rating: 4 / 5 with 3 rating(s)
May 8th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
In the end, the best seats for these games will be the free seats. You know, the seats in front of the TV.
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Rating: 3 / 5 with 1 rating(s)