The Rams struggled on the field during their first season after returning to Los Angeles, leading to high-profile patches of empty seats at their temporary home in the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. This led to the inevitable discussion about whether the city had already spurned the team.
By at least one standard, though, the NFL’s decision to relocate the Rams to L.A. is already a big winner: The team in 2016 was the top contributor to the shared pool of ticket revenue among the 32 clubs. The team contributed $27 million to the pool, said a source who provided some of the internal league rankings.
Teams contribute one-third of their ticket revenue to the shared pool, which would put the Rams’ ticket revenue in the neighborhood of $80 million. The shared revenue is evenly divided among the league’s 32 teams.
Ticket revenue figures for the Rams’ final season in St. Louis were unavailable. The Rams declined to comment.
The Rams had empty seats as the club flailed to a 4-12 finish, but those seats were still sold. The team took advantage of the heady days in the aftermath of the January 2016 relocation vote to sell 70,000 season tickets to the coliseum (the club also had 10,000 tickets a game available for walkup sales). The team’s policy putting coliseum ticket holders first in line for seats at the new stadium, scheduled to open in 2019, is also a sales spur. Season-ticket packages for the Rams reportedly ran from $360 a seat up to $2,025. The team’s average attendance for eight home games in the past season was 83,165.
The No. 2 team contributing to the ticket pool was the Denver Broncos, followed by the New England Patriots, Carolina Panthers and New Orleans Saints, the source said. All of those teams sell out their games and have relatively large stadiums.
The league calls the pool the visitors’ team share, but it is an anachronistic term, dating to a period when one-third of ticket sales from a game was shared only with the visiting team.
Teams can hold back contributions if they have stadium debt, though the percentage differs by deal. Still, it leaves big-market teams like the New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys lower on the list than one would expect — 11th and 12th, respectively — and makes it impossible to deduce whether the Rams, the top contributor to the pool, actually had the most revenue from ticket sales.
The last two teams on the list are the Oakland Raiders, which contributed $9.1 million, and the Jacksonville Jaguars, at $8.8 million, the source said. The Jaguars at their annual state of the franchise presentation earlier this month noted 2016 was a difficult year for the team, which went 3-13. In addressing the session, team President Mark Lamping noted he had some not-so-good news, and then proceeded to outline drops in TV ratings and fan avidity.
