ARLINGTON, Texas – Jerry Jones won’t put a number on the attendance for the Dallas Cowboys’ home opener until the crowd is announced later this month at AT&T Stadium.
The team owner also hopes the 80,000-seat venue with standing room that pushes capacity past 90,000 will be closer to full as the 2020 NFL season goes on.
All of which is to say the league’s clubs are preparing for a rapidly changing environment amid the COVID-19 pandemic – while accepting the bottom-line notion that playing games with limited numbers of fans or none at all will affect revenues this year.
“You think about the lost revenue that these teams have across the board with no fans in the building,” said Bill Rhoda, president of global planning for Legends, a stadium operations company co-owned by the Cowboys and the New York Yankees.
“And it goes from tickets to the concessions, to the merchandise at the game, to the lack of private suites being used, which then has an impact on sponsorships. So there is a trickle-down effect that this virus has had on the industry as a whole.”