fan experience Archives - Wakeman Consulting Group

Real Attendance: The Only Attendance Number That Doesn’t Lie

August 20, 2026
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A recent UCLA football game announced an attendance of 27,143. The turnstile scan was 12,383. That’s a huge gap. A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Applied Sport Management looked at 48 Division I men’s basketball programs over three seasons. Almost a thousand games. The average no-show rate was 37 percent. In my experience, that’s […]

Premium Seating’s Consistency Problem

How to fill seats when the buzz wears off Walk into any new or renovated arena. Premium seating…as far as the eye can see. Capital One Arena: 4,500 new premium seats. FC Barcelona: tripling Camp Nou’s hospitality inventory. The trend is everywhere. The real problem isn’t building the seats. It’s filling them. Consistently. The first […]

The Broker Debate: Three Voices…More Than One Truth?

This started on Tuesday. Randy Nichols drew a comparison between bootleggers and ticket brokers. (As the grandson of a famous Georgia bootlegger, I took no offense.) “The carry inventory, risk, need to deal with forecasting,” he wrote. “But at the end of the day, they aren’t a partner. They’re stealing.” Josh Ludwig jumped on that […]

Why I Keep Writing About Live Nation

What Talking Tickets is about for readers, old and new. Why Live Nation? Why Now? I’ve been writing a lot about Live Nation over the last few days. The trial. The secret settlement. The unsealed documents. The David Marcus reply on LinkedIn. It’s a lot. Especially since I don’t really ever write about or think […]