Winnipeg Jets unlikely to fly away again, experts in pro sports say

There's little danger of Winnipeg losing a National Hockey League franchise a second time, experts in the business of professional sports say in the wake of comments about low ticket sales from Jets co-owner Mark Chipman.

After selling out almost every game for the first nine seasons after the NHL returned to Winnipeg, average attendance at home games this season is 13,140 fans, which works out to 86 per cent of the hockey seating capacity at Canada Life Centre.

Some of the tickets the Jets are selling are discounted, such as $29 seats the club has offered to university students via text message for Tuesday night's game against the St. Louis Blues.

Gross ticket revenue for all events at Canada Life Centre — including the Jets, Manitoba Moose and concerts — appear to be down almost 20 per cent since 2019, according to entertainment-funding tax estimates included in City of Winnipeg budget documents.

The most concerning stat concerns season ticket sales, which were capped at 13,500 when the NHL returned to Winnipeg in 2011. Those season tickets now number approximately 9,500, The Athletic reported on Friday.

"I wouldn't be honest with you if I didn't say, 'We've got to get back to 13,000,'" Chipman told The Athletic. "This place we find ourselves in right now, it's not going to work over the long haul. It just isn't."

There are many reasons the Winnipeg Jets lost nearly a third of their initial season-ticket base. The drop in demand first became noticeable in 2019, when it suddenly became easy to purchase a ticket to almost any given Jets game.

This phenomenon accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when some ticket-buying fans suddenly found themselves out of a job — and others determined they'd rather spend money in other ways when the cost of living began to skyrocket.

"Whenever the economy slows down a bit, at the margins, you start having the impact," said Glen Hodgson, an Ottawa-based economist and co-author of Power Play: The Business Economics of Pro Sports.

In Winnipeg, the passion for hockey runs up against economic realities, said Hodgson, a former Manitoban himself.

"Clearly the fan base cares very deeply, but Winnipeg was always going to be a challenging market long-term because of its size of less than one million people, income levels, and also the absence of some big head offices that would buy the boxes and buy the advertising," Hodgson said.

But there was another reason for the drop in sales: True North was doing a poor job keeping existing ticket buyers happy, something Chipman conceded in the Athletic interview.

"For 10 years, we weren't a sales organization. We were a service organization, and I'm not sure we were that good of a service organization, to be honest with you," he said. 

Chipman was not available to speak to CBC News, a spokesperson said.