I’ve purchased 1/3 of 76ers season tickets for a few years now. That’s two seats per game to 14 games a year plus playoffs.

The strategy was to attend most games and sell the super high value games (Warriors, Lakers, etc.) because they’re worth a lot, then get as many playoff tickets as you can.

But it’s gotten to the point where it’s just not worth it to do this anymore (sorry Paul). Here’s why:

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76ers Keep Raising Their Price

Ticket prices keep going up despite the team never doing any better. This season was about ~$100 per ticket. This would be fine if we won a Championship (or even made an East Finals), or if the resell price went up with it, but the resell price has gone down.

My tickets to tonight’s game against the Celtics are going for $100 a ticket on Stubhub / Ticketmaster. A Friday game against your biggest rival is going for face value. What do you think a Tuesday game against the Kings goes for? Why wouldn’t I just buy all the tickets on Stubhub and pay $100 for the great Celtics game and $20 for the shitty weekday Kings game?

Additionally, I had tickets to the Warriors game this year which was on a Saturday. I received $406 for two tickets. So a 100% profit. That’s… good? But doesn’t make up for the seven weekday games against sub .500 teams that sell for less than $40.

I can’t continue to buy these if I can just buy tickets on Stubhub to every game for cheaper.

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Stubhub & Ticketmaster SUCK

Ticketmaster took over the tickets for this season. The issue is NO ONE USES TICKETMASTER. I’ve listed three games on Ticketmaster this season and none of them have sold. Zero. No one uses Ticketmaster.

Which leads to Stubhub. Tickets actually sell when you list them, but they made two horrible decisions this year.

The first is they now charge a 15% fee to the seller now instead of 10%. Everyone does 10%. Fuck off.

But the second is more egregious. They now require you to declare your ticket sales as income if you sell over $600 in a year. This is mind boggling.

First, if I buy a ticket for $100 then sell it for $50, I shouldn’t have to pay tax on the $50. If anything this should be recorded as a loss of income on my taxes!

Second, they declare your sales as the final sale price, not the amount you actually receive. So if I sell $1,000 in a year on Stubhub, I only receive $850 of that because of the 15% fee. But the IRS takes it as $1,000 sold, so I’m paying taxes on the fee that I’m giving to Stubhub!

I’ve research this a little and some of this is Stubhub simply following what the IRS says. But fuck that. This whole thing is enough reason to stop using Stubhub entirely.

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Playoffs

The one good thing about season tickets is that you have first dibs on playoff games and the price is very reasonable. There’s a slight markup each round, but you can sell them for 2-3x easily.

The issue is simply that if I didn’t have season tickets at all, the money I save throughout the year by buying cheaper on Stubhub / not having to take any losses through Stubhub and selling tickets, would be enough to pay for overpriced playoff tickets.

I love the 76ers, but between their outrageously high pricing and the ticket-selling-services making things impossible for small sellers, this will be my last year having season tickets.

Go birds.