Ugh, that model needs to be rethought. I was hoping once the hockey arena was finished UConn would be in a better position to renegotiate the deal. I wrote about it one time on the basketball board, but at best playing in a pack to XL would be only slightly more breakeven to playing in a full Gampel. The deal gets worse if it’s not a sell out.
Don’t get me wrong, the XL is actually a good venue to see Connecticut hockey and I’ve enjoyed the games that I’ve gone to there, but the CDRA has an absolutely predatory attitude regarding uconn. In essence they transfer a large portion of their operating losses to the athletic department, which makes it look like it is ineptly run.
Here’s that post:
I did a quick and dirty computation in another thread, but in essence, the rental for the XL center is $40,000 +3 dollars per seat. So it cost us about 88,000 for a full house. Assuming a cost of $25 per ticket the gross revenue we would make would be about $390,000 (15,600 x 25) in the net profit of $302,000.
At Gampel Arena we, essentially, keep our profit so 10,000 seats at $25 per seat comes out to $263,500, but at Gampel we also get parking in concessions revenue. Figure north and south garages park roughly 3000 each and add an event cost of five dollars per car that’s an additional $30,000. So revenue before concessions would be equal to $292,500 before concessions.
Thus, if we make $9,500 per game in concessions, and I have no figures whatsoever on what we do in concessions, then a sold out game at Gampel makes the school as much money as a sold out game at the XL Center, notwithstanding the differences in capacity.
Said differently a sold out game at the XL Center makes us less than $10,000 more than a sold out game at home, before any profit we make on concessions.
This does not include seat license fees. I don’t have that information readily available. It also doesn’t include the relatively nominal costs to open up and staff Gampel. On the other hand, it also doesn’t include the costs of transportation to Hartford, accommodations in Hartford, if we’re still doing that, and meals in Hartford. But the big take away from all of this is that playing at the XL center is not a windfall for us in any way shape or form. In the analysis above was under the best possible circumstances, a complete sell out of the facility. If we’re not selling it out, we’re losing money
