From Fair Pay, Fair Play pages 27-29 and 169-173.
The Detroit Lions have been a terrible football team for decades. In 2016 they announced higher prices for the upcoming season and a month later warned more increases were coming:
“I would like to get to the point where we’re at least average, because unless we’re average, we’re going to be struggling to compete nationally with other teams that have more resources,” team president Ron Wood told a gathering of season ticket holders. “In order to be competitive, we have to be competitive financially. Other teams have raised ticket prices 20 or 30 percent per year to try to get up to that league average. I did not want to do that to our fans, so I took a very thoughtful approach. I know it wasn’t met with a lot of applause, but it was for a reason.”
This “we need more money to keep up with the other teams” gets repeated by other teams as well and creates an upward price spiral in all pro-team sports leagues. This has resulted in price increases that far outstrip the rate of inflation with no accountability if the team fails to produce the promised better team.
This was captured by comments to one report of these prices increases. Commenter Stumpy said the ability to raise prices no matter the product quality creates “a sense of entitlement by the owners and a money grab. I have to earn my raises at work, why shouldn’t the Lions?” His comment prompted this rely from commenter Haloti Ngata’s Personal Chef:
@Stumpy Your comment gets my Like ^ 100 power.
If you apply this logic to our salaries then every mediocre employee would get his salary raised to the average for that field. There would be no incentive to work hard or do anything extra since you know you can be a FCKOFF and still get the average salary.
It’s time for you to join the team and get into the game. Share with the team your concerns/frustrations on this issue. Do you have a current example? Share it. Below the comment box you can see what the team is saying on this issue.