The Buffalo Bills’ new stadium has some seats with obstructed views. What’s worse are the ticket prices

The Buffalo Bills play their first preseason game at their new Highmark Stadium on Saturday, but season ticketholders got a sneak peek at an open practice last week.

Some weren’t happy.

Social media was flooded with photos showing obstructed views of the field from some seats. Even though a handful of fans were upset over sightlines, there is an even bigger problem: how costly attending games will be in the new $2.2 billion stadium.

That includes higher ticket prices and personal seat licenses (PSLs), which just give fans the right to buy season tickets, not the tickets themselves. PSLs cost $750 to $50,000 per seat. That comes on top of the $850 million in taxpayer money already paid to fund construction.

Season ticketholder Angelica James, whose seats between the 20- and 30-yard lines wasn’t blocked, said she chose to go with worse seats this year for the same cost as last season. However, she’s not angry at her team.

“It’s not just the Bills,” she said. “It’s everyone in the world is trying to make money.”

Five other National Football League teams are planning new stadiums in the next five years, in Hammond, Indiana (for the Chicago Bears); Cleveland; Kansas City; Tennessee; and Washington, DC. They are all likely to arrive with their own PSLs, higher ticket prices and more premium seats, meaning fewer cheap ones.

The NFL’s last building boom at the start of this century raised the average cost of tickets by 30% during the first year of a new stadium, according to Victor Matheson, professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross who specializes in the business of sports. He expects this next round will increase ticket prices by the same percentage, if not more, as well as more expensive PSLs.

PSLs are automatically included in new NFL stadiums, Matheson said, because they are big money makers. Under NFL rules, teams need to share ticket revenue with the rest of the league. But they can keep all of money earned from PSLs. Every NFL team with a new stadium has used them since the Carolina Panthers first introduced them at Ericsson Stadium in 1996.

The Bills raised an estimated $250 million from the sale of PSLs for its new 60,000–seat stadium, according to Kurt Badenhausen, sports business reporter for Sportico. That comes out to an average of about $4,000 per seat.

That’s what fans pay on top of the season ticket prices, which in the case of Highmark, can be double to comparable seats in the old stadium.

James and her husband, Cameron, were prepared to pay for PSLs along with somewhat higher ticket prices. But when they attended a meeting for season ticketholders, they discovered the seats they had purchased for $4,300 each last year would now cost $8,610.