We gave away 46,000 fewer tickets — and set an attendance record.

In 2018, Indy Eleven distributed 62,952 complimentary tickets.

That's not a scandal. Every club does it. Comps fill seats, they honour sponsor agreements, they seed new audiences, and — this is the part nobody says out loud — they make the announced attendance number look better than the business underneath it.

The problem is that a comped seat and a paid seat look identical on television and behave completely differently on a spreadsheet.

What comps actually cost

A free ticket isn't free. It costs you the revenue from the seat, obviously. But it also costs you three things that are harder to see.

It devalues the product. If a meaningful share of the building didn't pay, the market learns that tickets are available for nothing if you wait or know someone. That's very difficult to unlearn.

It corrupts your data. A comped attendee doesn't tell you anything reliable about demand. Build a forecast on a house that's a third comped and you're modelling generosity, not appetite.

It hides the real problem. As long as the announced number looks healthy, nobody has to confront why paid demand isn't growing.

The decision nobody enjoys

Cutting comps means accepting, at least temporarily, that the crowd might look smaller. In a lower-division market, where perception genuinely matters to sponsors and to press, that is a real risk and it deserves to be taken seriously.

We took it anyway — and structured it so we didn't have to choose between a full building and a paid one.

The comps that remained were redirected rather than eliminated. Community commitments stayed: 2,500 tickets went to community organisations and 37 community commitments were honoured across the season. What went away was the untargeted, habitual papering that existed because it had always existed.

A full house you didn't sell is a marketing expense wearing a costume.

The thing we stopped pretending

What actually happened

Complimentary tickets fell from 62,952 to 16,763 — a 73% reduction.

Paid tickets rose from 109,856 to 165,639 — up 50.8%.

Paid share of the house moved from 63.6% to 91.2%.

And total attendance hit 182,457 across 20 dates — a club record.

We didn't trade crowd size for revenue quality. We got both, because the growth in paid demand outran the reduction in giveaways.

Why the paid growth happened

Cutting comps doesn't grow paid attendance by itself. It just makes the gap visible. The growth came from the season-ticket work underneath it.

Full-season ticket units grew 109%, from 3,505 to 7,334. New season-ticket-member acquisition grew 329%, from 473 to 2,029.

That's the real story. We weren't squeezing more money out of the same crowd — we were converting occasional attendees into committed ones, which is the only ticket growth that compounds year over year.

The second-order effect

Something happened that we predicted but couldn't prove until we saw it: merchandise revenue per attendee rose 144%, from $0.85 to $2.08.

People who pay for tickets buy scarves. People who were handed tickets, largely, do not. The paid house wasn't just more valuable at the gate — it was more valuable at every point of sale inside the building.

Stadium revenue reached $3.26M in 2019.

What transfers

Almost every organisation has a version of the comp problem — a number that looks like performance but is actually subsidy. Free trials that never convert. Discounted seats sold as full-price wins. Traffic bought so cheaply it can't possibly be qualified.

Three things made this work:

• Separate the vanity metric from the business metric before you try to change either. Announced attendance and paid attendance are different questions.
• Cut the habitual, keep the strategic. Community tickets had a purpose. Papering the house out of anxiety did not.
• Fix demand at the same time. Cutting comps without building season-ticket demand just produces a smaller crowd and a worse story.

The number that matters is rarely the number on the scoreboard. It's the one underneath it.