Miami Dolphins President Tom Garfinkel had a risky offseason proposition for owner Stephen Ross: Eliminate most team ticket sales to brokers, an amount that topped 8,000 in 2014, or nearly 20 percent of the Dolphins’ season-ticket sales.
Why would a team that has struggled to fill seats eliminate a sure score? Because brokers often sell to fans of visiting teams, impairing the home-field advantage. And Garfinkel wanted his beefed-up sales staff to sell the tickets.
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Enthusiasm around the team resulted in a season-ticket sellout of more than 46,000 tickets.
Photo by: Getty Images |
Ross said yes to the proposal.
“Because of the culture Steve has created, people are not afraid to fail,” said Matt Higgins, the team vice chairman who runs Ross’ multicompany sports arm, RSE Ventures. “Tom knew if he was wrong Steve was going to back him.”
The Dolphins are sold out this year, with more than 46,000 season tickets, only about 2 percent of which brokers bought, validating Garfinkel’s faith in his sales team. The team’s ticket revenue is up 46 percent since the end of 2012, and, according to the club, it has more group sales than any franchise in the NFL.
Ticket sales are just part of the story. A host of initiatives underway at the Dolphins in the last year are chipping away at the perception of a team mired in South Florida, sunshiny mediocrity:
■ A new sports science effort, led by former South African rugby and English Premier League physiotherapist Wayne Diesel, who came onboard in February.
■ A $450 million team-financed stadium renovation.
■ A player analytics unit, led by a Ph.D. in statistics candidate at Iowa State, and a business analytics department led by a former NBA executive.
■ A new general manager as well as the hiring of Mike Tannenbaum as executive vice president of football operations.
■ And certainly not the least, the biggest NFL free agency signing by dollars of the offseason, Ndamukong Suh.
“I look at the Dolphins organization as one that is very forward thinking,” Suh said after a practice last month in Davie, Fla. “All the regeneration, sports science, training.
Go Fish: Also in our NFL season preview
■ RSE Ventures: Inside the sports holding company of Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.
■ Ross unplugged: Dolphins owner talks about putting the team together, learning from mistakes.
■ Number crunching: Nielsen data on NFL ratings, the Los Angeles market, and what will be flying off the shelves at kickoff.
“If they don’t have it, they find it,” he added.
Supporting everything are the financial resources of Ross, a famed New York real estate developer. When a controversial Florida political push to gain public money for the stadium renovation failed in 2014, Ross self-financed. Asked about the expense of the sports science effort, which monitors players’ biometrics and even provides each athlete his own customized drinks designed for body salinity and digestive characteristics, Ross all but shrugs his shoulders.
“I don’t know, I bought the team to win,” he said in an interview in his Manhattan office last month. “If you want to be best in class, it is going to cost more money. It is that simple.”
Attention to detail
A fit and trim 75-year-old who stays in shape by several times a week walking up the 55 floors of his Time Warner Center office building two steps at a time, Ross is far more involved in the Dolphins than his geographic distance from Florida suggests.
Ross estimated he saved $150 million in renovation costs because of his contacts and know-how in development.
Once while with Higgins in France, the executives took a side trip to Manchester, England, to look at the city’s train center roof because it is similar to the one that will cover Sun Life Stadium’s seating bowl by next year.
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Fans watch a preseason game in Sun Life Stadium’s new club “living room” boxes.
Photo by: Miami Dolphins |
Ross walked the station floor, asking strangers about noise, acoustics and light, Higgins recalled. Later, the owner hired an acoustics expert from his alma mater, Michigan, to calibrate the stadium audio system to the coming roof, which should be installed by next season (the pillars to hold the canopy are in place.).
Asked about the most granular stadium detail he is involved with, Ross responded. “Every single detail. The color of the seats. I went to different places and made sure it was the color I wanted.”
Joe Rose, a former Dolphins tight end who played with Dan Marino and is a local sports radio host, praised the owner for his largess.
“Any time an owner buys a team and they don’t win they get criticized,” said Rose, citing some of the poor win-loss records since Ross bought into the Dolphins in 2008. “He has never said no to money that could improve the team. To that extent, he has got to be one of the great owners in sports.”
At the nexus of the Dolphins is Garfinkel, who is nearing his second year running the team. When he arrived in 2013 from the San Diego Padres, the team’s season-ticket base scraped 35,000, Ross’ struggle with local politicians and a player bullying scandal rocked the brand, and fans were upset with what they perceived as the owner’s focus on non-football issues.
“Ross is a businessman first, and I don’t begrudge him that,” said Peter Ratzan, 45, a Weston, Fla., education
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This illustration shows how the new roof will look when completed at the stadium.
Photo by: Miami Dolphins |
consultant whose family has owned Dolphins season tickets since 1977. “Since Ross has owned the team there has been all the things to add glitz and glamour, the orange carpet, [celebrity investors] Serena Williams, Gloria Estefan.
“No one cares about it if the product on the field is not successful.”
The team no longer is pursuing that strategy. Asked about the role of celebrity investors, Ross replied “none.”
The stain of that effort though lingers, underscored by Ratzan’s mention. “It was a departure from winning ballgames,” said Garfinkel, who arrived shortly after Ross dropped the celebrity focus.
Those who know Ross well said the perception he doesn’t care about football is not true, and he is a huge fan. But sometimes, like with the celebrity push, he can send, while well-intentioned, the wrong message. When he learns his visitor had been to see Dolphins training camp, he makes a joke suggesting that it must have been dull.
Tannenbaum, a former New York Jets general manager who was hired to create the sports science and analytics department among other duties, said he had never encountered a more engaged owner than Ross.
“I don’t think I have had a conversation with Steve Ross where he isn’t asking how we can do better, what we can do different,” he said.
Focus on the fan
Clearly Ross in unafraid of change, and that was Garfinkel’s charge.
The team president made wholesale changes in staffing, with promotions, firings and new hires (he declined to enumerate the headcount shifts). He’s brought in executive talent from AEG, the NBA, New York Yankees and elsewhere (see chart). Like many teams, the Dolphins now offer fans amenities like parties and meetings with coaches and players. The team even offers different categories for the fan membership club, one for families and another for hard-core followers, for example.
Head coach Joe Philbin, entering his fourth season, told team business and football operations staff gathered last month at the team’s indoor practice facility in Davie, “This is a much, much stronger organization than when I first got here.”
That is in part because Garfinkel zeroed in on the issues that drove fans away. In an interview at Sun Life Stadium, the lanky, bespectacled California native laid out what can only be described as a dystopian nightmare of what had been the Dolphins fan experience.
“You fight an hour in traffic to get in, and wait an hour in line with 100 people just to get through security, and then you get in and pay $12 for a beer and $12 for a stale hot dog, and you have to wait 20 minutes in line to get it,” he said.
“And you go out to your seat and the seat is so hot you can’t sit in it, and you sit in it and you have no leg room and you are sitting sideways. And the sun is beating on you and you are getting dehydrated and you have to walk 30 steps to go to the bathroom, and you have to wait in line for the bathroom.
“And you go to get water, and all you want is water but you have to wait in line with everyone else who wants hot dogs and nachos and everything else, and you have to wait 20 minutes. And you miss half a quarter and the best touchdown of the whole game. You go back to your seat and then the game is over and you come downstairs and sit in your car for an hour to get out of the parking lot.”
The renovated stadium, which this season boasts the full accouterments of new clubs, fancy leather seats, end-zone and sideline seating, and beefed-up technology, should solve many of the issues Garfinkel outlined. New apps will tell fans about bathroom waits, allow them to order concessions and, if they sign up, notify them of important logistical news.
In the coming years, the team is building pedestrian bridges and tunnels in the parking lot to alleviate the notorious logjams.
The vision is broader than just the team and its 10 home dates. Garfinkel expects to transform what had been dumpy old Sun Life Stadium into an entertainment destination, even with its own 25,000-seat theater built in the parking lot.
In addition, the team is negotiating with an entertainer who Garfinkel said would be akin to an artist in residence, and commit to 10 concerts starting in February 2017. The team plans to build a customizable 10,000-seat theater within the stadium just for the singer, who Garfinkel declined to identify.
“What is happening in South Florida, Miami, right now is a booming market that is a curator for culture for the rest of the country, the rest of the world,” he said. “Music, art, food, entertainment, sports, all of these things. People are moving here from all over Latin America, Europe and the Northeast.
“When you are talking about the stadium,” he added, “it is about becoming a global entertainment destination.”
And given the confidence expressed in Davie last month by Philbin and others, perhaps a destination for some NFL playoff games, too.
