SPORTS
Over the last month, the Sun-Sentinel and other outlets have reported that FAU was behind on its goal of 12,000 season tickets sold for its new stadium — that there was reason to worry and doubt.
But FAU Athletic Director Craig Angelos dismissed that immediately.
“Oh no,” he said quickly. “We’re not behind on season tickets.”
The new 30,000-seat stadium’s pro forma, a paper detailing financial goals needed to make money, called for the stadium to sell 12,000 tickets per game.
Angelos decided to set his sights on something bigger, something better. His goal became to not just sell 12,000 tickets a game, but rather, 12,000 season tickets — before a single game had even been played in the stadium, which is still being built.
“I just wanted to go after the lofty goal of saying, ‘Those 12,000 [tickets] that we need for games? Let’s just make them season tickets, instead of single game tickets,” said Angelos.
Last year, at Lockhart Stadium, FAU sold 1,300 season tickets, according to Angelos. As of June 28, the team has sold 2,700 season tickets for next season, or 20 percent of its goal, with three months until the stadium opens on Oct. 15, when the Owls will go against Western Kentucky University.
However, it’s not a necessary goal to have a solvent stadium. Angelos is setting the goal high on purpose because it will allow FAU to fail at the goal and still make money.
“If we even hit half of our revenue goals,” said Angelos, “we’ll still have enough to pay off our debt service every year.”
That debt service is a $2.5 million payment owed to Regions Bank, beginning next year, and continuing every year after for the foreseeable future. The new stadium, a $70 million project, has $44.5 million due in loans to Regions Bank.
The new stadium will also make money in other areas than just home football games. According to Angelos, the community development agreement between FAU and Boca Raton allows for 15 “ticketed” events to happen in the first year of the stadium.
Angelos said he expects to fill those 15 spots, and a great deal of them will come from international soccer games. He believes that with the Orange Bowl now defunct and Lockhart Stadium overshadowed by FAU’s own endeavor into stadiums, soccer games will now come to Boca.
“I think we’re going to be the preeminent soccer facility in South Florida,” Angelos said.
Whether or not FAU reaches its goal of 12,000 season tickets, the athletic department believes heavily that it can cover the pro forma goal of 12,000 sold tickets of any kind per game.
Mainly because they’ve done it before.
“I don’t worry about not hitting our ticket sales pro forma goal at all,” Angelos said. “Just because of our past, playing out of Lockhart Stadium, a dilapidated stadium, 20 miles away from campus, we were still selling more than 12,000 tickets a game, so I don’t fear that at all.”
There isn’t any worry coming from Angelos, and perhaps that’s because of how visible and loud advertisements for the new stadium have been.
The school hired Omni Advertising, an advertising agency from Boca, and partnered with the company to produce ads.
From radio spots on 790 The Ticket, to television ads, billboards and buses wrapped in FAU Stadium logos, there hasn’t been a shortage of eyeballs on the new stadium.
“Kind of an all-out assault on our community,” Angelos said.
Individual game tickets will be available sometime in August, according to Angelos, with the team focused, for now, on reaching its goal of 12,000 season tickets.
“We’ve hit that 12,000 sold tickets and beyond the last few years at Lockhart Stadium,” he said. “So that shouldn’t be a problem.”
