College Football Has A Problem: Empty Seats This week\'s discussion relates to m
ID: 388184 • Letter: C
Question
College Football Has A Problem: Empty Seats This week's discussion relates to marketing's macro-environment (Chapter 3) that affects demand for products and services and creates market opportunities and constraints. It was in the news that College football has an attendance problem. While the average announced attendance in football's top division dropped for the fourth consecutive year in 2017, declining 7.6% in four years, the actual figures are much lower according to schools' average count of tickets scanned at home games-the number of fans who actually show up to Watch the game-, which is about 71% of the attendance one sees in a box score, according to the data collected by The Wall Street Journal. In the Mid-American Conference, for example the scanned attendance numbers at the gate for teams for Eastern Michigan University and Miami (Ohio) were 32% and 36% respectively. Even teams in the richest conferences such as Southeastern Conference (SEC) and Big Ten routinely see thousands fewer people passing through stadium gates than they report públicly. The no-shows reflect the challenge of filling seats in large venues when nearly every game is on TV, and no-shows threaten a key revenue source for college athletic departments. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1. Who are the fans who attend College football games (e.g. gender, age, socioeconomic background, ethnicity, household patterns, etc.)? What are the root causes and consequences of diminishing college football attendance? 2. Do you think there are structural changes (shifting trends) in fans bases for College football? what might those trends look like 5 years and 10 years from now? Why?Explanation / Answer
Answer: 1.Demographics of fans who attend college football games
Age: out of total fans 30% of fans who attend the college football games fall in the age between 45-65 and 13% of them are above 65 yrs of age or fall between the age group of 20-30.
Education level: Most of the fans who attended the game were college educated, out of the total no. of fans 28% of them has got bachelor degree, 19% got graduate degree and 25% were still college going students.but 28% of the fans has never gone to the college.
Income:out of the total no. of fans who have attended the game, 35% of them have annual household income about $100,000 and 20% of the fans have an annual household income more than $60,000 but less than $100,000.
Sex: 57% of the total fans were men and 62% of them were women fans
Ethnicity- 80% of them came from out of Minnesota. 20% of them were from New York Minnesota, Pennsylvania, California, Massachusetts and Texas.
There are many causes of fall in attendance, some of these are given below.
1. Main cause of declining the attendance in college football is HD television. Now people prefer sitting at home and watch the football on HD view.
2. Lack of Wifi could be the one of root cause- In todays world it is very necessary for the people to stay connected using internet facility. due to lack of WIFI in stadium people can not access internet if require.
3. Expensive Tickets and increased other expenses: expensive tickets and expansive parking facilities as management is not paying attention to expand the parking facility. everything is overpriced and they don't even provide options of any kind of concessions.Thats why attending college games has become an expensive task.
4. Another cause is people are having problem with the decision of providing the rights to the the TAF-NGO to control and manage the whole event.with this decision, People who are having the tickets are getting the back seats but donors always gets front seats.
Consequences :
1) Due to the decline in attendance ,Key revenue source of the college athletic department is in danger.They have to Redesign their event to attract more and more fans to generate the profits.
2) Commercialisation of Games: fans are showing the games authority a new trend in which they are claiming to be arational consumer of entertainment and authority has to understand how to attract the consumers.
3)Decline in college game attendance emphasises on the situation that football is in danger in our country.