USC pulls out all stops to sell football tickets, promote full stadium. Is it working?
Shane Beamer has an effervescent, salesman-like quality to him.
You see it in the way the Gamecocks football coach interacts with recruits along the sidelines ahead of a game on a fall Saturday at Williams-Brice Stadium. You notice it in the way he quips with reporters during press conferences.
It, too, showed in the way Beamer pointed a group of 200 fans gathered at a May booster event at the Western Carolina State Fair grounds in Aiken toward the season-ticket booth set up in the front of the room.
“Season-ticket sales, if you haven’t visited that tent, I would encourage you to get back over there,” Beamer told the group. “(Gamecock Club President) Wayne (Hiott) literally just told me three minutes ago that he found out just today our season ticket renewal rate is at 97% right now — which is the highest it’s been in a long, long, long time.”
“But what we haven’t done is sell out season tickets. We need to do that. I see a lot of our competitors announcing that. We need to make sure that we do that also.”
Though Beamer has re-energized the South Carolina fan base with his personality and back-to-back winning seasons, it hasn’t resulted in a surge in overall season-ticket sales. But there’s optimism that could be changing.
Meanwhile, the university has shifted some to prioritizing single-game ticket purchases and is increasingly focused on meeting fans’ demand for premium seating options — all while trying to improve the Williams-Brice experience without pricing out the average fan.
Season tickets trending up
Getting fans to games today is different than it was when Beamer first landed in Columbia as an assistant coach on Steve Spurrier’s staff in the mid-2000s, when season-ticket sales regularly exceeded 50,000 per season.
South Carolina sold 62,618 season tickets during Steve Spurrier’s 7-5 debut season in 2005. That number was just over 40,000 for the 2022 season and has not surpassed 50,000 since 2016.
In the post-COVID era at South Carolina, season tickets have been a tougher sell and attendance has steadily decreased as fans are increasingly willing to spend more money on tickets to attend a select few games, or would rather enjoy watching from their living room instead. The pandemic also had an impact on sales, as economic factors forced some fans to drop their season tickets.
“They may not be able to be in a position where they buy season tickets anymore,” said Lance Grantham, South Carolina’s senior associate athletic director for ticketing and parking. “And you can attribute that to any number of things — different age of the fan base versus younger kids who don’t think about season tickets as much and they come to the one or two big games they want to come to. All those things are part of the factors. There’s no one specific reason. It’s just the way the industry is right now.”
It doesn’t mean the athletic department is in dire straits or that attendance has unexpectedly fallen off a cliff. Selling tickets remains big business and a big boon to USC’s coffers. Football ticket sales generate around $20 million per year toward the athletic department’s budget and netted an average of just over $19.6 million per year in the five seasons leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The dips come through natural attrition and changes in fan behavior over time, in addition to a slight shift in focus from season-ticket sales to single-game options — which accounted for a little over 27% of all attendance during the 2022 football season.
That said, the season ticket numbers have started to rebound.
Following a 7-6 first season in 2021, Beamer’s squad torched No. 5 Tennessee and downed No. 8 Clemson to close the regular season in an 8-5 encore campaign in 2022. The excitement from those seasons helps sell more tickets and keeps a high retention rate among season-ticket holders.
“Winning cures all, for sure,” the Gamecock Club’s Hiott joked. “We need to make sure that we make hay while the sun is shining and, when given momentum, we capitalize on every inch of it.”
There’s internal optimism USC could approach 44,000 season tickets sold this coming fall, which would mark the best year of sales for the school since 2019.
“Our fan base still is very engaged in buying tickets,” Grantham said. “You do your season sales. You get that done. … You have promotions that you put out. All those things help you fill the building. That’s where we were at last year and we’re hoping to be again this year — full buildings every Saturday night.”
What does a ‘sellout’ mean these days?
Through a public records request, The State obtained ticketing and attendance data from South Carolina’s 2022 football season in an effort to understand the trends and nuances that exist with attendance.
One finding: The six games at Williams-Brice Stadium announced as sellouts last season had actual fan attendance closer to 49,000, despite USC promoting an average attendance of 78,158 for those sellouts.
“The perception of having good attendance goes a long way. That has been there historically,” said Dr. Stephen Shapiro, a professor in the USC College of Hospitality, Retail and Sports Management whose research has centered on ticket pricing in sports and consumer behavior. “Maybe our understanding and the use of technology over time has evolved to have a better view of who’s attending, why they’re attending games and that type of information. But the actual reporting of attendance being a little inflated — that’s been around.”
A 2023 study co-authored by Shapiro that examined the differences between announced attendance and actual attendance at FBS college football games showed an average difference of over 12,000 fans between the reported per-game attendance and actual attendance.
More locally, USC’s average announced attendance over all seven of its home football games this past season was 75,785 fans. However, scanned ticket data for those contests — obtained through the public records request — revealed nearly 30,000 fewer people per game attended in person than what was publicized as the official attendance figure. The discrepancy is due, in part, from ticket-holders who opt to not attend the game for whatever reason.
Announced attendance at USC football games generally reflects a combination of tickets sold or given away, along with others inside Williams-Brice Stadium such as ticket takers, policemen, band members and more, Grantham said.
The university also categorizes sellouts as either “soft” or “hard.” Hard sellouts mean every ticket available has sold; whereas a soft sellout generally includes getting close to selling out, but then giving away a number of tickets shortly before kickoff in order to declare the game a sellout.
Complimentary tickets made up 46,190 (8.7%) of the total reported attendance across of just over 530,000 fans across all seven home games. The military was far and away the biggest benefactor of those free tickets, accounting for 26% of them.
Weather, too, can be a factor for individual games — like this past season’s S.C. State game that was moved from Saturday to Thursday due to an impending tropical storm. That game had an announced attendance of 61,551 — with 23,840 tickets scanned on gameday.
“No one in our business (uses the) scan number,” Grantham explained. “They just publish how many ticket admissions they got out before the game and that’s where we land at. It keeps the fans feeling good about the program. It’s part of the overall puzzle pieces.”
2022 Opponent | Reported attendance | Total Tickets scanned |
Georgia State | 78,297 | 50,575 |
Georgia | 78,212 | 50,447 |
Charlotte | 77,982 | 48,586 |
SC State | 61,551 | 23,840 |
Texas A&M | 77,837 | 49,513 |
Missouri | 77,578 | 47,088 |
Tennessee | 79,041 | 50,556 |
Average | 75,785 | 45,801 |
Total | 530,498 | 320,787 |
Premium seating, stadium upgrades
Where the balancing act at South Carolina and elsewhere in college football remains is with sorting out how to cater to high-dollar boosters willing to shell out for premium seating vs. offering affordable options that create a full venue and raucous atmosphere.
“Is it better to have a full 45,000-seat stadium where it’s a sellout, or is it better to have 45,000 people in a 75,000 seat stadium that doesn’t look full?” Shapiro posited. “It’s kind of an interesting way to look at it.”
The demand for premium seating and the potential revenue streams that come with it have exacerbated that middle ground in Columbia.
South Carolina recently opened 2023 season seat selection to Gamecock Club members, which includes a pecking order for choosing seats that’s determined by varying giving levels. The premium seats available during this year’s cycle sold out by the time that Diamond Spur Gamecock Club members — status earned by giving $30,000 or more per year and the highest designation level in the Gamecock Club — wrapped up their choices, according to Hiott.
“It sold out at the very pinnacle of what it possibly could have, because we didn’t have enough tickets and we have all this excitement,” he said. “Case in point. We need more premium seats. We need more club seats. That’s just the way that people want to consume sports now.”
To its credit, South Carolina has made efforts to improve premium seating options at Williams-Brice Stadium in recent years, while also catering to those fans who are below the larger giving levels prerequisite for acquiring such tickets.
The 2001 Club and Traditions Club were both added as part of a $22.5 million project completed ahead of the 2020 season. Part of selling access to those club areas included a one-year fee on top of what the seats cost, Hiott explained. That extra money was then diverted to the “Stadium Enhancement Fund” — a fund dedicated to help with smaller-scale improvements at Williams-Brice in other portions of the stadium.
Those adjustments included improvements to the bathrooms on the southeast side of the stadium and adding a new concessions stand to and expanding the west main concourse for better foot traffic flow.
“We’re now getting to the point where we have enough money built up in that fund over three years where we can use those dollars to put out ‘fires’ around Williams-Brice where we need to,” Hiott said.
What’s next with ticket sales?
As Beamer headed for the door in Aiken following his spiel, a handful of fans gathered and chatted with Gamecock Club staffers who hung around the season-ticket booth stationed behind the podium the USC’s head coach had since vacated.
The Gamecock Club has hired an additional 20 staffers in the last year to help encourage ticket sales and foster a more personal connection between the organization and fans, Hiott said.
“If you’re borderline deciding on whether or not you want to renew your membership or not, we want it to feel like you’re going to have to make that phone call to break up with your rep,” he quipped. “That’s the depth of relationship that we want.”
Williams-Brice Stadium itself, too, could be in line for major renovations, though it’s unclear right now what that could include. South Carolina is in the infant stages of exploring a massive development project that would include 900 acres of land the school owns around the stadium and near the Congaree River.
While attendance and ticket sales have dipped in recent years, there’s hope for significant rebounds. Tennessee, for example, had seen its season-ticket sales dip from almost 67,000 in 2010 to just over 52,000 in 2021. Following an 11-2 campaign in 2022, the Vols announced in April they had sold more than 70,000 tickets for this coming season.
South Carolina is still seeking a breakthrough season of that magnitude under Beamer, but the program has been on an upward trajectory over his two years.
A few more wins and the ticket sales ought to follow.
USC football: Season ticket sales year by year
2005: 62,618
2006: 61,826
2007: 60,004
2008: 54,347
2009: 47,851
2010: 45,985
2011: 47,591
2012: 49,195
2013: 51,967
2014: 54,005
2015: 51,167
2016: 50,395
2017: 49,700
2018: 47,381
2019: 47,347
2020: 8,475 *COVID*
2021: 38,483
2022: 40,050
2023: 44,000 (projected number)
