you will sell less season tickets, but make more money off that portion of sales...
the ticket price you set in regular season will fill it up regardless of how many you see of season ticket prices. so, even if you sell 1 season ticket, you can still have max capacity... Also, this doesn't effect the price you have to set it at...
e.g. lets say april 20th (not opening day, but early) it takes $26 to get max capacity attendance. the number of season tickets sold will not affect this. it will affect profit, of course... selling too few will be outweighed by teh differential loss between season tick price andn # of thos sold vs 26*seats lost due to too high of a season ticket cost etc...
not saying max capacity is best for total revenue either.. it might be.. it's defintiely ~near that point and you probably like leading league in attendance .. ego thing... i do
it's not all gravy. you could make less by pricing season tickets up too high.. 2 independent variable require a bit of calculus to maximize profit.
no worries if you don't want to find data points and do the math.. simply compare similar loyalty/interest years and the resulting Revenues... keep increasing season ticket price as long as you make more revenue... if it dips for reasons not related to less loyalty or interest, you know you went too far on upping your season tickets.
once my team is in the playoffs every year, i do nearly double my season ticket price. this sells ~1/3rd of capacity. it's near optimum, but not saying it is optimum, lol... i get lazy about the last few million. didn't take note of data points to figure it out 100%. just eye-balled it.
this may be due to an inordinate amount of wins.. you probably don't want to start out at ~double... and you probably can only do this in seasons with high fany loyalty and interest.
in losing seasons, it is very likely taht quantity will outweight a preumium price relative to total gate revenues... compare lost seats to gain in ticket price... lose 2000 attendance, but 2 more dollars, that's a net gain in all but extreme cases..
(say it's 30k vs 28k @ 30 / 28 ticket price - lets say 14k were season tickets... to evaluate this you first you have to deduce season tickets sold.. so 16k and 14k seats. 14k*30 = $42,000 but you lose 2000seats @ 28 wwhich is a 56k loss. not a good choice in this exmaple.. this is the dynamic you learn during regular season. and you can see the mess it makes when you try toconsider optimal season tickets sold
)
to do it perfectly you'd have to setup the equation and figure out the dynamics... rate of change per $ andinterst etc etc... you don't even have to udnerstand the math after that.. use a graphing calculator and pick out the peak.