Physical sports ticket stubs are as dead as the pressed paper pulp they used to be printed on.
Or are they?
Yes, admission to this week’s MLB All-Star festivities has been distributed digitally, as is the case with almost any major sporting event today. But for fans seeking a physical token tied to the 94th Midsummer Classic, MLB is offering so-called souvenir tickets for $25 a pop.
If the sale goes anything like similar ones offered around last month’s Negro Leagues tribute game or Paul Skenes’ home debut with the Pittsburgh Pirates, hundreds of fans will snatch up the slips.
Covid-19 essentially ended the era of physical ticketing, but it clearly didn’t kill the human desire for hard-good collecting (even if NFTs took their best shot). The pandemic ultimately didn’t spell doom for 126-year-old printing firm Weldon, Williams and Lick either.
WW&L has been responsible for sports ticket printing since the 1920s, producing stubs for Super Bowls, Olympic Games, World Cups and other massive events. It developed unique capabilities along the way—such as the ability to embed Yankee Stadium dirt in MLB’s 2008 All-Star Game tickets.
When events shut down in 2020 and ‘21, WW&L saw a 67% revenue drop from ’19 to ‘21. Though it hasn’t returned to its peak size, the Arkansas-based business has since found a path forward. It now focuses on the physical credentials that remain, from college campus parking passes to luxury concert badges.
And the company is growing a new side of the business: tickets that don’t get you in anywhere. WW&L CRO Evan Gitomer said souvenir tickets now represent nearly 10% of the company’s business, with roughly 50% year-over-year growth in that category.
“There was that moment in time in professional sports, probably close to 15 years ago, where the data that [teams] would get from [digital] tickets became more valuable than the value of people experiencing that opening of this fancy book or fancy tickets or whatever it may be,” Gitomer said. “When that happened, we had to start to get creative and figure out how we’re going to be relevant.”
WW&L is behind the current All-Star offering as well as other recent MLB products. Some clubs have elected to make commemorative tickets available only to those who can verify they had actual seats at a given game, while others have opened up the opportunity to all fans.
They’re not trying to bring back the box office. Physical ticket-backers accept the benefits of our digital revolution—no more leaving stubs on the kitchen counter or missing the first two innings because your friend with the tickets is stuck in traffic. And fans have a right to be miffed that the cardboard now costs extra, when the price of going to a game—fees included—is often higher than ever. Today’s souvenir tickets can be simpler than their antecedents too, as our click-to-buy world prioritizes speedy delivery over craftsmanship.
At the same time, physical tickets have never been more valuable. Tickets for Jackie Robinson’s 1947 MLB debut and for Michael Jordan’s 1984 NBA premiere have each auctioned for nearly $500,000 in recent years. Covid lockdowns generated the perfect mix of nostalgia, boredom and access to online marketplaces to trigger a boom. Entire sites have sprung up to celebrate stub hoarding.
PSA says the volume of tickets submitted to be professionally graded has gone up more than 800% since 2019. Now the company grades more stubs in a year than it did across the first 10 years it offered the service.
“Since there was a ticket, people have wanted to commemorate an event that they went to,” MLB deputy commissioner for business and media Noah Garden said. “That’s never going to change. Now it’s just making sure you can still foster that sort of passion.”
Physical media is seeing a rebirth outside of sports too. Tactile music album sales are reportedly on pace for their first year-on-year increase since 2004. With Taylor Swift’s help, vinyl sales alone reached a 30-year high in April. Premium Blu-ray movie disc purchases grew 16% in Q1 of 2024.
There’s something more than pure nostalgia or hipsterism at play here.
Research shows that when content corresponds to our sense of identity, consumers prefer physical over digital. We want to display our fandom. Studies found this is especially true for objects we intend to keep (e.g. a book vs. a newspaper).
That said, digital tools could improve the physical tickets we treasure. WW&L has already experimented with quickly adding game photos or stats to the collectible slabs it designs. The next step likely involves fans getting to place their own snapshots and memories in individualized half-foot pieces of history.
Of course, there is competition for the collector’s box. Quick-print t-shirt companies, souvenir newspaper and magazine covers, or rapidly produced Topps Now cards all offer their own pieces for posterity. WW&L has even experimented with producing commemorative coins.
“But the actual ticket is what people seem to want to hold on to to say that ‘Yes, I experienced this event,’” Gitomer said.
Eventually, purely digital alternatives could change that.
Startup AC Momento allows fans to create in-app libraries of ticket lookalikes recognizing their previous attendance across nearly 800 competitions. The online nature of the scrapbook means the service can generate stats tied to the specific collection of games each fan witnessed.
“Our goal with Momento has been to try and thread the needle between the nostalgia associated with physical ticket stubs and the modern reality of our digital world,” founder John Brennan said via email.
Earlier this month, users added a record 65,000 “momentos” on the platform in a single day. Fans are able to manually input older games not already in the app’s system. One user went so far as to log Opening Day of the 1959 MLB Season, digitizing his father’s previously handkept accounts as a gift, according to Brennan.
Momento is considering how personalized physical commemorative tickets could one day relate to their tech product as well.
MLB meanwhile is open to integrating digital memory features into its own app, Garden said. Down the road, he added, the league would like for commemorative tickets tied to every game to be available, not just for marquee affairs. “Each game—and we have a lot of them—has a different meaning every night to every fan,” Garden said.
Garden has held onto the ticket from the first Mets game he attended with his dad, for instance. But, he said, he doesn’t revisit it nearly as often as his card collection.
So, what’s the final prognosis for the physical proof of entry? Will they survive a generation who never knows the joys of watching a ticket get ripped? Will they be replaced by a better kind of keepsake?
It seems to me that those pesky stubs have already proven that—if properly maintained—they’ll stand the test of time.
Printed tickets might not grant you access to an arena, ballpark or stadium these days. But what is the point of showing up, anyway, if not to gain a memory worth preserving?
(This story has been updated in the seventh-to-last paragraph to update the number of user-added momentos. This story has also been updated in the sixth-to-last paragraph to better clarify Momentos’ considerations of physical tickets.)
