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Stadium Watch Blog
Tim Nelson

Those Vikings seat licenses are selling fast

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Red Zone Lounge
Interior view of Red Zone lounge seats (Vikings image)

Despite the outrage from Gov. Mark Dayton two years ago, fans are ponying up for those pricey seat licenses in the new Vikings stadium.

The team said today it was already almost 1/3 ahead of its budget for sales for all of 2014, after just four months.

Vikings director of communications Jeff Anderson says they've sold $51 million in licenses. They'd hoped to sell $37 million by the end of December.

"We're early in the process," Anderson said in an interview. "But we're strongly encouraged with the early positive returns and the overall sales process we've established, getting a lot of positive feedback from fans. We've completed 3,400 appointments in the preview center in the first four months."

That belies some of the doubts about the seat licenses. The average NFL team sells more than $200 million worth of the licenses in new stadiums, and the Vikings were contemplating a $151 million plan before Dayton took them to task for dunning fans for both tickets and licenses. The so-called "stadium builder licenses" are one-time fees that give fans the rights to season tickets, essentially "owning" the seat, although they still have to pay for game tickets.

All told, Anderson said, they've sold about 13,400 of the 65,000 seats in the new stadium, currently under construction in downtown Minneapolis. They're only about a quarter of the way through offering new seats in the 16 "zones" of current seat holders.

Anderson also said there's now a waiting list of several thousand fans who don't have season tickets now, but still want to get seats in the new stadium.

The new stadium is scheduled to open in July 2016.