Coming to a mailbox near you soon: the future of Baltimore football, a costly world in which budget-minded fans can get upper deck, end zone seats for an initial season investment of $45 a game and high rollers can spend up to $360 for a club seat on the 50-yard line, including one-time licensing fees.
Next week the Ravens will begin mailing out booklets to season-ticket holders and other interested fans detailing the cost and terms of watching the team when it plays in the new downtown stadium, now under construction.
The prices, while high -- the best 900 club seats in the house will cost $2,975 a year and carry a one-time, $1,000 license fee -- are less on average than observers had expected.
"The pricing is aggressive, but certainly not as bad as it could have been," said Sean Brenner, editor of Team Marketing Report, a Chicago-based newsletter that tracks the cost of attending games.
The team will stress in its literature and advertising that its non-premium seats will average $40.37 a game for each of the first three years in the stadium.
Most teams adjust their prices on a two-year cycle, but the Ravens extended that by a year to assuage fans worried about buying a seat license only to end up paying a fortune for season tickets every year.
That means that Ravens games almost certainly will be below the NFL's average at kickoff in 1998. Slightly more than half the season tickets will be $35 or less a game, excluding the permanent seat license. About half of the club-seat customers who put down money in the city's 1993 expansion drive will find their prices have come down.
It is the PSL, however, that is likely to trip up fans raised on $4-a-game Colts tickets. A new concept to the area, seat licenses are growing popular among teams building new stadiums or changing cities, as the Ravens, nee the Cleveland Browns, did last year.
A seat license averaging $1,136.20 will be required of Ravens fans before they can buy a season ticket. The license both enables and obligates a fan to buy a season ticket each year; a licensee not buying a ticket will forfeit the document.
The license money is due before the stadium opens, in three installments. But in a change since the plan was sketched out this summer, seat licenses will be available for as little as $250, instead of $500. They will top out at $3,000. About 6,000 seats in the 68,400-seat stadium will be reserved for single-game sales and not require a seat license.
