Getty Image / Bryan M Bennett
It seems like everybody wants a stadium upgrade these days.
The A’s are trying to move to Vegas.
Down in Jacksonville the Jaguars want their stadium to be renovated.
The Chicago Bears are reportedly looking at leaving Soldier Field.
One team who knows for sure that they’ll be getting their upgrade in the near future is the Buffalo Bills.
The Bills are expected to move into the new Highmark Stadium in 2026, but it seems there could be one small problem with that move.
At their current stadium, the Bills have 63,000 season ticket holders. The one they’ll be moving into only holds 60,000.
According to The Buffalo News’ Michael Petro, the team is going to try to limit tickets purchased by brokers to solve this problem, but there may also just be season ticket holders who get priced out.
There currently are 63,000 of them. But the new stadium will only seat a little over 60,000. That means almost 3,000 current season ticket holders could be left out in the cold when the new stadium opens. https://t.co/wKLmhFytkf
— The Buffalo News (@TheBuffaloNews) June 20, 2023
To make this situation even worse for Bills fans, those 63,000 season ticket holders don’t even represent the full capacity of the current stadium. That stadium holds 71,608 when sold out.
That means they will actually be losing more than 11,000 seats when they move, so there could be more than 3000 season ticket holders that would lose their seats if the team also wants to leave some single-game tickets available to fans.
It’s the unfortunate reality of these new stadiums that they are ridiculously expensive and team owners will pass that expense on to ticket holders. Now Bills Mafia will become the latest fan base to take on the added expense.
Let’s just hope the Buffalo Bills find a way to limit the number of actual fans that end up losing their season tickets during this move.