Well, something had to give.
The Bills don’t want to pay for their new stadium, and they’ve acknowledged that the fans don’t want to pay for the new stadium with Personal Seat Licenses. With the public authorities clearly not inclined to foot the whole bill, either the Bills or the fans will be footing part of it.
Drum roll, please.
Via the Buffalo News, the Bills now plan to sell PSLs in order to raise the money for a new stadium.
“We will definitely have PSLs as part of a new stadium,” Ron Raccuia, executive vice president and lead negotiator for Pegula Sports and Entertainment, told the Buffalo News. “Every new stadium that’s opened since 2009 has utilized PSLs.”
That’s a far cry from what co-owner Kim Pegula said in 2018: “I know fans in Buffalo don’t want higher ticket prices, they don’t want PSLs.”
The good news is that, according to the Bills, the PSLs won’t leave most fans SOL.
“We will most likely have the lowest PSLs of any new stadium built since 2009,” Raccuia said. “And that’s a function of the market and us being committed to making sure that we don’t price our fans out of the marketplace. We will be very cognizant of that with PSLs.”
The entry level for the PSL program will be $1,000, along with an obligation to annually purchase season tickets.
“If a PSL is structured correctly, it really does provide an additional benefit to the fan,” Raccuia said. “And we’re committed to making sure that the PSL package that any fan ends up having with us is going to have value.”
The biggest value is that it helps keep the team in Buffalo.
The money needed via PSLs isn’t yet known, because the deal with the politicians isn’t yet done.
“A lot of factors that go into that,” Raccuia said. “We have to know what type of deal we’re doing with the state and the county.”
The biggest question for Terry and Kim Pegula continues to be the size of the check they’ll need to write from their own personal fortune to pay for the stadium. Chances are that the percentage of their net worth that goes to the cost of the stadium will be less than the percentage of net worth that those buying the PSLs will fork over to finance the new venue.