The Blind Side
alim@theguidon.ocm
Tickets from P250 to P5,000 or higher? That’s how inflated the interest in the rivalry is.
July 24 marked the season’s first Ateneo-La Salle game. While most of the pre-game chatter was of key match-ups, new recruits, and the 2-2 records of both teams, in Ateneo the hallway talk was about tickets—because without connections, or friends with connections, there was no bypassing high prices, or getting up early to beat the long lines.
When ticket selling began at 9am on July 21(Wednesday), people started lining up as early as 6am. And even then only Upper B tickets were available to students, Upper As, Lower Box, and Patron tickets were nowhere. By 10:30 am, the College Athletics Office was left with only GenAd tickets.
The issue is an on-going debacle in the UAAP. But on July 24, when fans in blue stood up to greet the Blue Eagles, one thing was apparent: empty seats, and hardly anyone in SRO (standing room only); a sight that significantly contrasted past Ateneo-La Salle games.
Where had all the tickets gone?
It is easy to blame the alumni for hogging the tickets, but here are a few facts most students aren’t aware of.
Before we even get a chance to dip into the UAAP ticket pool, corporations have already been given first dibs. With several corporate sponsors, of course, a return of investment is expected. For these corporations, this ‘return’ comes in the form of tickets.
For families working in these corporations it means having a direct access to the games. Word goes that some companies sponsor the UAAP just so they can get tickets.
One example is Globe. Just a day before the game (Friday), they had a stand in the Loyola Schools Covered Courts. If you bought a minimum of P300 worth of load, you were given an Upper B ticket. While it was a good marketing ploy, this puts the ethics behind ticket distribution in question.
The message the UAAP seems to be sending is this: you sponsor us, we’ll give you tickets—tickets withheld for profit-making purposes. But what about all those students that actually attend the UAAP member schools, who in the four years of studying in the university, want a chance to support their respective teams?
Fact: the Araneta Coliseum’s has a maximum seating capacity of 20 thousand, although with SRO, the Coliseum can hold a maximum capacity of 25 thousand, divide that number by two and you get the number of tickets allocated to Ateneo, roughly 12,500. Hypothetically, every student in the Loyola Schools can get a ticket, but factor in the alumni, the Grade School, the High School, the corporate sponsors, the bandwagon fans, and the scalpers, and you get a major scarcity of tickets.
Increasing demand, stable supply; there are simply not enough tickets. Every year a freshman class is injected into the Ateneo basketball fan base, while another batch graduates into alumni status. Unless, the Araneta Coliseum has plans of expansion, or another real-estate conglomerate invests in a bigger venue—such as Henry Sy’s supposed 50,000-seater stadium rumored to be built in Pasay—this is the sad state of the UAAP. Tickets (or lack thereof) will be a never ending problem.
