Here we go again? NFL to assess St. Louis market
• By Jim Thomas
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/foot...cle_8d5a4f06-3749-5f69-8c80-27bceea30bb0.html
PHOENIX • It’s well established that assembling the land, getting that land shovel-ready, and putting together a financing plan are key elements in the north riverfront stadium plan that could keep the NFL in St. Louis.
But add another speed bump to the mix. In NFL parlance it’s something called market assessment.
“The market assessment puts a data-driven estimate on the PSL potential,” said Eric Grubman, the NFL executive in charge of Los Angeles, relocation, and stadium issues. “The number of tickets you can sell to season-ticket holders. The pricing of those tickets.
“The number of suites and club seats that are desired by the market. The likely pricing that will work.”
This should sound familiar to Rams season-ticket holders, past and present, who filled out NFL surveys via email a few weeks ago.
“And we’ll also get some sense of the depth of corporate support for things in addition to premium (seating) — sponsorship, naming (rights), and so forth and so on,” Grubman said.
The league plans market assessment visits next month to all three cities in danger of losing their team to Los Angeles: St. Louis, Oakland, and San Diego.
Grubman said he’s already booked a trip to San Diego in the middle of April. He has yet to schedule the St. Louis trip. But coming to St. Louis is nothing new for Grubman, because he has made trips there about once a month since last fall working with Gov. Jay Nixon’s task force of Dave Peacock and Bob Blitz.
“Each of the times we’ve gone to visit them we’ve made good progress,” Grubman told the Post-Dispatch at the NFL owners meetings.
According to Grubman, the league has retained the Legends firm to do the market research in St. Louis, Oakland, and San Diego — as well as Los Angeles.
“We’re well on the way,” Grubman said. “We’ve launched in Los Angeles months ago. It has different components along the way.”
The “launch” in St. Louis took place a few weeks ago with the email surveys to season-ticket holders. The market assessment programs are about to begin in San Diego and Oakland. The full assessment process will take about two to three months.
“We’re sharing that information with league clubs,” Grubman said. “So it’s to the benefit of anybody who has a need to see it.”
Once the email surveys come in, Grubman says additional steps include focus groups. There is also corporate surveying taking place, including calling the CEO’s of major companies and asking questions related to their interest in the NFL in St. Louis.
All of which is critically important to St. Louis, because it’s widely believed that one of the escape hatches Rams owner Stan Kroenke will try to employ to skirt league relocation guidelines is the lack of market — and particularly — corporate support in St. Louis.
Grubman said the market study of St. Louis will be “fully developed in probably three or four weeks.”
So in a city known as a baseball town, the assessment will gauge the level of football interest in St. Louis from a fan and corporate support point of view.
“You develop the architecture of the financial plan not just to finance (a stadium) but to support (a team) for years to come,” Grubman said.
In other words, you can have a fantastic stadium plan and great financing, but if the market support is tepid? Well, it’s as important as any other component in deciding if any of the cities in question will have the NFL in its future.
“You got it,” Grubman said. “It is a key part. And that’s why we chose to do them independently (with the Legends firm), so that owners weren’t presented with a plan that had a filter from someone that either wanted to be in that market, or didn’t want to be there.”
For beleaguered Rams fans who remember the unsuccessful effort to land an expansion team in the early 1990s, followed by the successful effort to lure the Rams from Los Angeles to the Midwest, you can almost hear the collective groan of Not Again.
For the second time in less than 25 years, the region must show the National Football League how much it likes the product.
Wait, there’s more. Grubman said the NFL has discussed the possibility of conducting some sort of PSL (personal seat license)/luxury seating campaign as was conducted during the expansion process.
“We’ve talked about it,” he said. “I don’t think that we would necessarily want to take that step without all the other pieces being in place.”
By that he meant the land assembly, financing, etc.
And then, almost thinking out loud, Grubman added, “If your question is would we launch that (premium seating campaign), and if it failed would we pull back (from a market)? I wouldn’t like to do that.
“I want to think about that some more.”
Grubman said the league discussed such a seating campaign for Los Angeles when having a team there was a league-driven plan as opposed to the present team owner-driven plan.
“Once teams are involved, I’m not sure that a team wants to do that because they are tainting their existing market if they’re out selling in a new market,” he said.
Rams fans and corporations in St. Louis might not be too fired up about committing to season tickets or luxury boxes if the Rams were undertaking a simultaneous campaign in Los Angeles.
