PSLs ‘likely’ coming to Broncos Country

According to Forbes, Rob Walton and family are worth $130.7 billion. To put that in perspective, let’s borrow the method described by author Bill Bryson in his book I’m a Stranger Here Myself. He imagined a fictitious room where unending stacks of $1 bills were piled high and a person inside is given a marker. We’ll pretend it’s the Broncos mascot, Miles.

If [Miles] initialed one dollar per second, [he] would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort [he] would acquire [his] first $1 million. Thus, it would take [him] 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days— something over three years—to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years [Miles] would become a billionaire…

If [Miles] initialed one dollar per second, [he] would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort [he] would acquire [his] first $1 million. Thus, it would take [him] 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days— something over three years—to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years [Miles] would become a billionaire…

Tasked with a sharpie and the chore above, it would take Miles just 4,141 years, 231 days, 4 hours and 40 minutes to count dollar-by-dollar, the Rob Walton & family fortune. No bathroom breaks. No sleep. No hype sessions on top of the scoreboard.

…but they are going to claim they need your money via personal seat licenses to help offset the cost of building the new stadium.

Personal seat licenses are a one time or recurring fee for season ticket holders to get the right to buy their season tickets. Shockingly enough, the Broncos have managed to survive 66-years of season ticket sales without them, but now they’re suddenly necessary? It’s a cash-grab scam done by other teams to gouge their fans out of even more money; a scam that casually lives right next to $220 jerseys, $45 hats, and $19 beers.

Often touted as necessary to fund new stadiums, personal seat licenses are a junk fee that has been adopted by 21-teams in the NFL. The Broncos are not one of them. Leech’s statement, with it’s soft language – ‘likely’ – is little more than Leech sticking his naked toe into the water, trying to assess how such a needlessly greedy move would be received.

I get it. A new stadium (that nobody is clamoring for) costs money. The Broncos current stadium was built for $400.9 million ($774 million in today’s money). The Waltons could easily build 168 Empower Fields at current values. Sure, but what about a modern stadium? They could finance the construction of 27 SoFi Stadiums at a cost of $5.5 billion each. What should be profoundly clear is that the new Broncos stadium can be comfortably built, multiple times over, without the need for personal seat licenses.

Fans of the Denver Broncos are some of the most fiercely loyal in the NFL. We travel to games, we buy the gear, and we show up when it matters. There is no reason for new Broncos ownership to shake fans down for even more money with bogus fees to finance a stadium they could build with stacks of cash poor Miles couldn’t count by hand in a thousand lifetimes. Greed like this, even in the most gorgeous hues of orange and blue, is still greed and it has no place in Broncos Country.