I think saying attendance and viewership are down are using very limited data points.
Football and Gambling on football outside of last year has never been more popular.
NBA media presence has never been higher
Ticket prices have never been higher
Rights fees have never been higher and Facebook/Twitter are about to blow the doors of those numbers in the next round of agreeements.
Cord cutting is a real phenomenon but sports has been the most resistant programming.
The big change is that it has never been easier to follow your team without attending. And the quality of the product at home is amazing compared to the quality of poor expensive seats.
What I do see happening is sports remaining popular, the value of premium seats continuing to escalate but the value of non-premium seats going down. Also the death of season tickets will occur outside of businesses. It just doesn't make sense to have them. So I think the best path for the Flames is to wait 5 years until Facebook /Twitter change the face of sports. Then build a stadium that has 10,000 luxury seats with no public money.
Build the next Camden yards instead of the next Skydome.
The future is going to be about premium instagramable experiences that separate you from the commoner. The next generation wants a distinguishing experience over a lot of the same experience.
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