Chiefs President Mark Donovan Addresses Raised Ticket Prices at Arrowhead Stadium

Kansas City Chiefs team president Mark Donovan addressed fan concerns with rising ticket prices in a press conference with local media on Wednesday. Also discussing the challenges of the Chiefs' plan to allow fans into Arrowhead to start the upcoming season while limiting capacity to 16,000, Donovan explained the logic of the Chiefs' pricing choices.

Editor's note: For the sake of providing Donovan's full statement and context, the following block is Donovan's full answer to a question about the rise in ticket prices. To see Donovan's statement in video form, you can watch the video at the top of this page.

"What we did in putting together our plan for ‘how do we take a stadium from 76,000, 75,000 seats down to 16,000 seats and equally and fairly distribute those tickets to our Season Ticket Members?’ – as you can imagine, when you do the math, it's pretty quick, you can't. So, what we did was we said all Season Ticket Members who had the opportunity to move their tickets to [20]21. There'll be benefits and incentives to do that. We've locked in their pricing – flat pricing – for next year. They have the opportunity to win free tickets to games. There are a lot of different benefits that our ticket sales staff has done a great job on. And then we sat down and said, how do we make this fair and equitable in terms of the tickets we do have?

On the pricing issue, in May, when our schedule was released, we announced our single-game ticket pricing. In May, when we announced those prices, we were assuming we were going to have 76,000 people in the stadium and those prices were based on a lot of very complicated algorithms and data that we use to understand the market and understand what the value of those tickets are in this market. Before we reduced to 16,000 seats, before we went through any of these changes, we set those prices. We haven't changed those prices. They're exactly what they were. Those are single-game prices and they’re based on the value of those tickets in the marketplace.

I know there's been a lot [of feedback] and we completely understand and expected the response because it is a significant jump. Number one, that’s the value of having a season-ticket plan, you have the benefit of those ticket prices being much below market value, but you're committed to the full season. A single-game option gives you the option to pay a little more, in some cases a lot more, because you're buying one game. So, you're not obligated to buy the full season. You're buying one game and you're paying what the market rate is. Now to defend the market rate, and I think most of you who are interested in this issue would probably have already done the research. We’re pretty good from a data standpoint and algorithm standpoint in our team of understanding what the tickets are really worth and being below that number.

So even though, again, acknowledging that there's significant jumps, the person that buys a ticket to our Houston Texans game today at the price that we're selling at, can put that on the secondary market that minute and make more money. Hundreds of dollars more, based on location. In some cases, a $400 ticket is going for a thousand dollars on the secondary marketplace. So, what we're trying to do is be fair, but represent the market.”

For more on the Chiefs' plan to open Arrowhead Stadium to season ticket holders in 2020, click here.