My thirteen-year-old legs could not move fast enough. We were climbing the seemingly endless ramps that encircled the Kingdome to reach our seats. The muted gray concrete was in sharp contrast to the crystal blue waters of the Puget Sound and cloudless blue sky that accompanied the hike. Finally reaching the entrance to our section felt like a movie in slow motion. I could hear the buzz of the crowd before we reached the doorway. It grew louder and clearer as we entered and saw the bright green field with shiny silver helmets of players milling about. Electricity crackled in the air. Everywhere you looked was a bright blue Seahawks jersey or cap or sweatshirt. The noise we generated together once the game began, fused with the product on the field to create a bond between fans and players who had never met and likely never will. I don’t remember if the Seahawks won or lost. I do remember feeling like I belonged, like screaming my head off was welcome and not weird. That was my first Seahawks home game. It would not be my last.
My first purchase when I moved to Seattle after college in 1997 was two season tickets. The venue eventually changed from the Kingdome to what is now Lumen Field, but the experiences remained epic. I was there when the noise caused an NFL record 11 false starts against the Giants. I was there when the noise was unleashed on the Carolina Panthers in the first NFC Championship game in Seattle. I was there when the earth shook from a beastly run. I was there when the mighty 49ers tried the best corner in the game with a sorry receiver and helped send the Seahawks to their first ring. I was there when Aaron Rodgers’ smug face turned sullen after a historic collapse. I was there the last two home games when Bills and 49ers fans were so large in number that Geno Smith said it felt like playing on the road.
What has happened to one of the most storied home field advantages in all of sports? I started my research with that question in mind. What I found led me far beyond the city limits of Seattle.
The obvious
All home fields are impacted by the quality of the home team. Enthusiasm for a bad team is hard to muster. 49ers fans call themselves, “The Faithful,” but have famously left their stadium half-full during lean years. When asked about the increase in opposing fans at recent Seahawks home games, coach Mike Macdonald wisely identified the role the team plays in generating excitement and demand.
“We have to win,” Macdonald said. “We got to win, period. Opposing fans won’t want to show up if we’re consistently kicking butt and doing what we’re supposed to do. Our fans are doing a great job and they’re sticking with us all the way through the end of the game I know we’re fighting and they’re fighting with us and we have to do a better job of putting a product out there that they want to root really hard for.”
It is true the Seahawks have lost three straight at home. They are 15-15 since 2021 at home. They are 14-15 on the road. They are mired in the messy middle of NFL mediocrity, and that does not exactly stoke fan fervor. The franchise has gone through worse times than this, though, and still always managed to be a better team at home.
Seattle went 52-76 from 1991 to 1998 in a stretch that included the worst season in franchise history (2-14 in 1992) and two botched 1st round picks on quarterbacks (Dan McGwire, Rick Mirer). Even then, they were a .500 home team (32-32) and well below .500 on the road (20-44).
Seattle went without a playoff win for 22 years between 1984 and 2006, and Seahawks fans remained loud and vibrant, going 108-68 at home versus 71-104 on the road.
Something beyond wins and losses is eroding the Seahawks home field advantage. It turns out, this is not just a Seattle phenomenon.
Home field advantage decaying across the NFL
Teams performing better at home has been close to a sure thing in the NFL. In fact, if you look at every franchise one decade at a time during the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, there are only two examples where a franchise had a lower winning percentage at home than on the road over the course of a decade.
The San Francisco 49ers win rate at home was roughly 13% lower between 1980 and 1990 than on the road. Of course, that was in large part due to a dynasty stretch where they went an astounding 63-20 on the road, a 76% win rate. They were still 55-29 at home. The other example was the New Orleans Saints between 2000-2009, who were below .500 (38-42) at home and above .500 (45-35) on the road.
I looked at 123 discrete home and road comparisons for franchises in every decade starting in 1980 and ending at 2020 (table below). Just 2 of the 123 (1.6%) had a lower winning rate at home than on the road. Things have changed dramatically in our current decade.
Since 2020, nearly one out of every five teams (18.8%) have a home record that is worse than their road record. Another three teams have identical home and road records. That means 28% of NFL teams no longer have a home field advantage.
There is some noise in the data as a few franchises moved to new stadiums along the way or even new cities. Houston, for example, had the Oilers in the ’80s and came back as the Texans down the line. The Raiders were in Los Angeles, Oakland, and now Las Vegas. The results are still eye-opening.
Even with the mediocre play over the last few years, Seattle still has a bigger home field advantage than a number of teams, including the 49ers. They have, however, fallen relative to other franchises. Seattle had always been in the top half of the NFL before this most recent decade. They ranked 11th in the 1980s, 13th in the 1990s, 6th in the 2000s, and 14th in the 2010s. They have fallen to 21st in the 2020s.
The Seahawks home field erosion is just a part of the larger picture. Collectively, home field advantage is disappearing in the NFL.
It peaked during the ’90s when teams won, on average, at a rate that was 49% higher at home. That number has been cut in half.
Oddsmakers have noticed this change as well. It was common knowledge that home field was worth three points when Vegas would set the lines for games. That no longer is the case.
The home team has been getting as little as a one point advantage from oddsmakers in recent years. The Seahawks had been well above the league average, but have fallen in line the last few years.
One of the joys of watching your favorite team in their home stadium is that you could generally count on them being their best and opponents being their worst. As that becomes less and less of the reality, the draw to attending those games lessens. That can create a vicious cycle where fans choose to stay away or be less engaged which further reduces any advantage.
There are a number of underlying factors contributing to this troublesome trend.
Game changes
Crowd noise has always been considered a primary reason why it was harder for opponents to conduct their offense on the road. That has meant that home offenses operate more cleanly and score more while opponents struggle and score less. That remains true, but the home and road splits have been narrowing.
Defenses had been allowing an average of 13% fewer points at home than on the road in the 1980s. That has decreased in each decade that followed.
Teams had been scoring 16% more points at home than they were on the road. That dropped the next two decades before flattening out the last 15 years.
One football innovation that has likely contributed to this trend is the silent count. Howard Mudd is credited for inventing the silent count. He came up with it, in part, due to his time with the Seahawks in the 1970s and ’80s.
John Alt, a former offensive tackle for the Kansas City Chiefs in from 1984 through 1996 and father of Chargers rookie tackle Joe Alt, explained the challenges before the silent count.
“When we would go to Seattle, in that dome, it was a tremendous problem,” said John Alt. “It took away a lot of your offense. You couldn’t audible the way you normally would. And for those of us playing tackle, well, you’ve got a defensive end running forward [at a ridiculous speed] while you’re trying to block him a half-second late running backward. The line coach would be yelling, ‘Watch the ball! Watch the ball!’ But you just couldn’t do it.”
Mudd may have invented the silent count, but it was Peyton Manning and Jeff Saturday who perfected it at the turn of the century. It took some time for other teams to refine and master it, but the outcome has been a reduction in false starts and increased comfort in running your full offense.
There is some noise in false start data given that teams have false starts at home and the road, but the general trend from over 3 false starts per game on average in 2005 to below 2 per game in 2020 is clearly down.
Seahawks fans have taken pride in having an impact on the game with noise. Beyond forcing the Giants into a record number of false starts in 2005, they traded Guinness World Records for decibel levels in an open air stadium with the Kansas City Chiefs. It has become harder to feel that impact.
“My wife and I have been going to games regularly since 2012,” said season ticket holder Tyler Lawrence of Ephrata, WA during a town hall meeting I held. “Our fandom was forged in the fires of the young [Legion of Boom] and Russell Wilson era, and being a fan at that time was fun and as exciting, and you felt like you had a tangible effect on the game. Like me being at that game or not being at that game felt like there was a direct impact on the outcome of that game. It doesn’t feel that way anymore.”
Consider that when Seahawks fans set the record for noise in 2013, the decibel level was 137.6. The team has shown the decibels this year during recent games and it barely climbs over 100 at key moments.
Crowd noise has been a source of pride for Seahawks fans, and the silent count has muted the impact to some extent. Road teams also now enjoy the comfort of chartered flights, have learned about the importance of sleep patterns to combat jet lag, and have better ways to stay connected with loved ones when away from home. It is easier than ever to be a road team.
The more concerning trend is home fans choosing not to attend in larger numbers.
Experience “not the same”
Lawrence and his wife are part of a large cohort of fans who came in during a peak period of winning with a Seahawks team so talented it may never be matched. It would be easy to dismiss that cohort of fans as spoiled when they say the experience on game day is not as enjoyable as it was when they first got their tickets. The evidence indicates they are not alone.
I surveyed 100 Seahawks season ticket holders. Over half of them have had their tickets for 16 years or more. Nearly half (47%) of those longtime season ticket holders said they do not enjoy attending games as much as they did when they bought their seats. That is much higher than the 32% of fans who bought their seats in the the last 15 years. In other words, the longer you have been a season ticket holder, the more likely you are to feel the experience has degraded.
Team performance and ability to impact the game were raised as important factors for why the experience has declined. In particular, the Seahawks porous defense has made it feel pointless to cheer and depressing to attend.
A number of fans raised frustrations with the lack of continuity in their sections with either opposing fans buying up seats or single-game fans coming to be entertained more than to participate.
“I sit in a section and a lot of the people around tend to sell their seats,” said season ticket holder Jason Anderson of Maple Valley. “They just do it on the [Ticketmaster Exchange] so you can go to any game you want and you typically get an opposing fan in front of you who just gets absolutely inebriated and sometimes they get threatened to get kicked out, sometimes they don’t. But it’s just a constant recycling of things. And at some point it’s gotten to the point now where I won’t even take my kids to any sort of national game just because things can get really out of hand, and a lot of times it is the opposing fan base that just randomly bought a ticket to go to that game for the day.”
Sports betting and fantasy football has led to more people taking an interest in a game for reasons other than team loyalty. The loudest and most obnoxious person in my section at the Bills game was wearing a Packers jersey and screaming about the money he had on the Bills.
The quality dip for the in-person experience is coinciding with better at-home experiences, making the cost-benefit equation of going to a game less appealing than in the past.
A comfy couch and a big screen TV, though, are not really new. This influx of single-game fans is. The reasons behind that change are largely financial.
The almighty dollar
Paul Allen bought the Seahawks in 1997, and his first act as owner was to slash the prices of the cheapest seats in the Kingdome to $10. I bought two season tickets for a total of $200. They were the last row of the Kingdome on the 50-yard-line, and I could reach up and touch the roof from my seats.
Allen made the decision to cut the prices as he spoke with fans during the ballot measure campaign to fund a new open-air stadium.
“During the campaign, we learned that making professional football more accessible and affordable to families was important to fans across the state,” Allen said back in ’97. “I hope this enables more fans than ever to attend this year’s games.”
It accomplished exactly what Allen intended. It was raucous and silly and endlessly noisy up there. People sitting in those seats were folks like me, a new college grad with no money in the bank, or blue collar folks who lived for Seahawk Sundays.
NFL franchises have lost touch with the notion of keeping ticket prices affordable enough that any fan can dream of being a season ticket holder. The equivalent seats at Lumen Field have gone up over 1000% since 1997. Median household income levels have only risen 118% in that time, per US Census data. This is not a Seahawks-specific issue.
The Seahawks have, however, been above the NFL average in raising prices. The cheapest seats for a new season ticket holder would be roughly $2000 for two tickets. Lower level tickets on the sidelines would cost anywhere between $4,000-$10,000 for two seats.
That has the compounding effect of: (a) targeting wealthier consumers (b) making it more appealing to try and recoup some money by selling tickets to popular games. The team made that even more tempting by introducing variable pricing in 2014.
The single game price for a top tier ticket to see the 49ers play in Lumen Field was a whopping $917, whereas the same seat against the Cardinals costs just $282. That leads many season ticket holders looking at the math and realizing that selling the most high-priced games, even at face value, could recoup a big chunk of their season ticket prices. That creates a situation where your most important home games are the most likely to be sold by season ticket holders.
Secondary market services like StubHub.com and Ticketmaster make selling tickets easier than it used to be even 10 or 20 years ago. They also offer no control over who makes the purchase.
Almost 50% of season ticket holders I surveyed said they would choose an option that allowed them to sell only to Seahawks fans if the option existed, even if it was for less money. Another 39% said they would use it if it allowed them to sell at their asking price.
The rising ticket cost, the variable pricing, and the ease of digital sale platforms is leading to an increased supply of tickets on the secondary market. Demand is coming primarily from opposing fans, and sometimes from people who have a betting interest in the outcome.
The highest willingness to pay for a single game ticket tends to be opposing fans who are either traveling to attend the game or only get to see their favorite team play in Seattle once per year or less. Buffalo, for example, played just their second game in Seattle in the past 20 years. Bills fans who live in Seattle or who were making the rare cross-country trip were far more likely to shell out top dollar than a local who can see the Seahawks any week.
There is another systemic challenge that is driving more fans to sell their seats.
The drawback of primetime
Monday Night Football burst onto the scene in 1970 and helped the NFL accelerate momentum across the country. It became a ritual for many families to sit down on a Monday night together and watch the only football game being played.
The NFL started toying with another primetime game slot in 1987 when they aired the first Sunday Night Football game. By 2006, they added Thursday Night Football, albeit limited to those who had the NFL Network. They expanded Thursday Night Football in 2014 and made it available in more households.
This led to a big influx of revenue and more primetime games for fans to watch on TV. It also meant more games during the weekday where commuting to and from the game is far more arduous and often more expensive.
“One of the things I’ve really loved about the Seahawk [Sunday afternoon] experience is just driving into Everett and taking the Sounder [train],” said season ticket holder Andrew Taylor of North Vancouver, British Columbia. “It’s such a drag when you have Sunday night games or a Monday game or a Thursday game and you can’t [ride the train]. It changes the whole nature of the experience that we have to come in on a Thursday and deal with rush hour traffic, and driving through Seattle. It changes the whole feeling of the game. It goes from a low stress to a high stress experience. It’s just a huge, huge difference.”
A number of the season ticket holders I spoke to commute to the games over long distances like Andrew. Tobias Russ comes from Los Angeles. Bennett Smith comes from Boston. Lots of fans come from eastern Washington. Multiple people were driving from Vancouver, WA. Their return trip Sunday was a nightmare not only because of the loss to the Bills but the 45 car pileup in Kent that shut down I-5 South for hours.
Even for people who live in Seattle or Belleuve, getting to a evening game during the work week is challenging.
Add commute headaches for primetime games to variable pricing, inflated ticket prices, and the simplicity of secondary market selling. Getting paid to stay home and watch the game starts to sound pretty appealing.
What may surprise some is that a lot of the seats being sold are not coming from fans. Another entity is involved.
Personal seat licenses backfire
Sports tickets used to be a pretty simple choice of either purchasing season tickets or purchasing a single-game ticket. Someone decided that was not lucrative enough and invented the Personal Seat License (PSL). This diabolical scheme asked people to purchase a license for the seat at exorbitant prices, which gave the purchaser the right to then…still purchase season tickets. How exorbitant? There are horror stories of fans who had been long-time season ticket holders of the New York Giants being asked to pay $20K per ticket for the PSL and then another $7K for the season tickets.
The PSL fee is a one-time fee, and the premise behind it is that purchasers now own a transferrable license to the seat(s) they buy. They can pass it down to a family member or sell it on a marketplace.
Not all seats requires PSLs. They tend to be reserved for the best seats in the stadium. People spend money on all sorts of silly things, so why should fans care if someone doles out a bunch of money for a PSL?
Well, the nature of a PSL is that the owner can sell their license as they wish. What happened in Seattle was that a large number of PSLs (they are called Charter Seat Licenses at Lumen Field) were bought not by fans, but by ticket brokers.
Ticket brokers never planned to use the seats for themselves. They are constantly going to the highest bidder. The Seahawks have no legal recourse to reclaim the seat the way they could if it was a normal season ticket.
The highest concentration of these seats are on the 100 level visitor sideline where most TV camera shots show the stadium. That highlights the problem and perpetuates the idea that huge numbers of Seahawks fans are selling their seats.
The only way that will change is if the demand among Seahawks fans rises higher than the demand from opposing fans. That demand is directly tied to team performance, both the Seahawks and the visiting team.
There may not be a solution to the ticket broker problem. There do seem to be some ways to reverse the increased sale of seats by season ticket holders.
Ways to reclaim home field
There is not one simple solution to bring back the magic of home field advantage. There are some lessons to learn from franchises that are bucking the trend.
Weed out disengaged fans
The Dolphins have seen an increase in their home field advantage over time while the Broncos have managed to maintain their edge better than most. Both the Dolphins and the Broncos have instituted penalties for season ticket holders who either sell their seats too often or sell their seats for a profit. Fans have had their tickets stripped or have not been allowed to renew.
The Seahawks have not gone that far, but have put restrictions on who can buy Tunnel Club seats or special Gameday Experiences. Only fans wearing Seahawks paraphernalia are allowed. I think a lot of fans would be supportive of broadening that requirement to more sections.
Create opportunities to sell to home team fans
A number of fans mentioned that they only feel comfortable selling their seats on the Ticketmaster exchange because that is the only method that protects them from being liable if the person who buys the seats misbehaves. A season ticket holder could lose their seat if they sell through another platform and the person who buys the seat violates stadium rules.
The Seahawks have a Blue Pride waiting list for season tickets. Working with Ticketmaster to integrate those accounts with a flag that indicates they are Seahawks fans would open up the door for a ticket exchange feature where users could choose to restrict their sales to home fans or at least limit to home fans until a specified time when the seat will be released to any fan as it gets closer to the game.
Ticketmaster might not want to enable a feature that would allow sellers to take less money from home fans as it could cut into their fee revenue which is tied to sale price. They could, though, allow sellers to opt-in to paying the same fee even while taking a discounted price for home fans. It would reduce seller profits, but many fans would make that trade.
Everybody loves money, but a lot of season ticket holders are passionate about home field advantage and would take less money to help preserve the experience and increase the odds of a Seahawks win.
Incentivize loyalty
There is already a lower price for fans who have been long-time season ticket holders. There is an opportunity to create more incentives for loyalty. If teams like the Dolphins and Broncos are punishing bad behavior, why not reward fans who attend every game or a certain percentage of games over a certain period of time?
The advent of digital mobile tickets allows teams to know whether fans are attending games and whether they are transferring tickets.
Create an exclusive club with various levels and benefits for fans who hold onto their tickets and attend regularly.
Rewards could include: lower ticket prices, a free parking pass for a game, complimentary gameday experiences, training camp VIP tickets, discounts on food and drink at the stadium. Given all the perverse incentives described that are contributing to fans feeling more reason to sell their seats, it only makes sense that providing more rewards to keeping them is necessary to combat the behavior you are trying to avoid.
Bring back cheap seats
Most of these suggestions are made with the knowledge that businesses are always going to try and maximize revenue and profit. They can be done without hurting the bottom line, and in some cases, could help it. This is not one of those suggestions.
Allen was right that football is best when attendance is accessible to everyone. A requirement of Referendum 48, the bill to fund the construction of Lumen Field, was that the team “sell at least 10 percent of tickets for all team football games at the average of the lowest priced tickets in the National Football League.” My understanding is the Seahawks meet this requirement by selling 5% of season tickets at $77 per seat, and another 5% are sold as single-game tickets ranging from $35.99-$120 depending on the quality of the game.
I think they should go further. It may not be possible to have $10 seats any longer, but how about $50? Allen bought the Seahawks in 1997 for $194M. The franchise is currently valued at about $5.5B.
Valuation is not cash flow, but I would like to think there is a way the team could offer more season tickets at lower prices that were restricted to only Seahawks fans with the same paraphernalia rules as their experience packages without jeopardizing the business. Maybe a multi-year commitment could be required to get these cheaper seats.
There are a lot of hard-working folks who will never be able to afford the prices the Seahawks are currently charging. We need more fans invested in the game and fewer folks invested in checking their crypto balances or Slack messages.
Eliminate variable pricing
The team could make all these other changes and it would be hard to overcome the problems created by variable pricing. It is almost financially irresponsible to keep all your seats when selling two out of ten could cover so much of your total cost.
The most likely people to pay those prices are almost always going to be opposing fans except during times when the home team is truly contending for a Super Bowl. That is not a common occurrence, even for the most successful franchises.
If it is not financially feasible to eliminate variable pricing, at least dramatically reduce the degree of variability between games so it is not as tempting to sell. Short of that, make the prices for division games your lowest price to give your team the best chance to win the most important home games.
A simple decision made complex
The decision I make about whether to attend a Seahawks home game has always been pretty simple. If they are playing, I am there. There are the very rare occasions where something supersedes it like this year when my son was running his first marathon.
As much as I love the Seahawks and watching a game in person, it has been less fun the last few years. Primarily, that is due to the product on the field. The defense, in particular, has been soul-crushing. I have been through down times, though, and still enjoyed attending games.
The community aspect of coming together with people who start as strangers, but become familiar faces or even friends, is no longer a constant I can count on. The feeling that we are going to collectively rise and fall with the team has dissipated as more single-game fans and opposing fans take up space.
The NFL is losing home field advantage. It is not good for the sport, which will ultimately be bad for the business. Some of the tectonic shifts are irreversible. That does not mean the situation is beyond repair. There is a kid going to his or her first NFL game this Sunday. The best chance for that kid to fall in love with seeing the sport in person is for the home team to win, surrounded by cheering fans.
Seattle has been one of the jewels of the NFL for decades. USA Today recently ranked Lumen Field #1 among NFL stadiums. That reputation has been tarnished this season. It is not an aberration. It will not correct itself. Winning will help, but it is not enough. The same way communities rally to preserve landmarks or natural beauty that represents a region, the home field advantage that caused an earthquake is worth saving.
It will take effort from the team, the ownership, and the fans. There is no better time to start than right now.