New York Giants Tickets : The Giants Draw Their Fans From The New York Metropolitan Area

The Giants have had a long and, at times, turbulent financial history. The Giants were founded by Tim Mara with an investment of US$500 in 1925 and became one of the first teams in the then five-year-old NFL. To differentiate themselves from the baseball team of the same name, they took the name "New York Football Giants", which they still use as their legal corporate name.Although the Giants were successful on the field in their initial seasons, their financial status was a different story.

Overshadowed by baseball, boxing, and college football, professional football was not a popular sport in 1925. The Giants were in dire financial straits until the 11th game of the season when Red Grange and the Chicago Bears came to town, attracting over 73,000 fans.This gave the Giants a much needed influx of revenue, and perhaps altered the history of the franchise. The following year, Grange and his agent formed a rival league and stationed a competing team, led by Grange, in New York. Though the Giants lost $50,000 that season, the rival league folded and was subsumed into the NFL.

Following the 1930 season, Mara transferred ownership of the team over to his two sons to insulate the team from creditors, and by 1946, he had given over complete control of the team to them. Jack, the older son, controlled the business aspects, while Wellington controlled the on-field operations.After their initial struggles the Giants financial status stabilized, and they led the league in attendance several times in the 1930s and 1940s.

By the early 1960s, the Giants had firmly established themselves as one of the league's biggest attractions. However, rather than continuing to receive their higher share of the league television revenue, the Mara sons pushed for equal sharing of revenue for the benefit of the entire league. Revenue sharing is still practiced in the NFL today, and is credited with strengthening the league.After their struggles in the latter half of the 1960s and the entire 1970s, the Giants hired an outsider, George Young, to run the football operations for the first time in franchise history.

The Giants on-field product and business aspects improved rapidly following the move.The Giants are currently owned and operated by John Mara and Steve Tisch. Forbes magazine estimates the current value of the team at $974 million. This ranks them eighth among the 32 teams in the league in terms of estimated value. The value has steadily increased from $288 million in 1998, to their current value.

The magazine estimated their revenue in 2006 at $182 million, of which $46 million came from gate receipts. Operating income was $26.9 million, and player salary was $102 million.Current major sponsors include Gatorade, Anheuser Busch, Toyota, and Verizon Wireless. Recent former sponsors include Miller Brewing and North Fork Bank. Game day concessions are provided by Aramark, and the Giants average ticket price is $72.

The Giants draw their fans from the New York metropolitan area. Since their move to New Jersey in 1976, fans from each state have claimed the team as their own. In January 1987, shortly before the team won Super Bowl XXI, then New York City mayor Ed Koch labeled the team "foreigners" and said they were not entitled to a ticker-tape parade in New York City. On February 5, 2008, the city, under mayor Michael Bloomberg, threw a ticker tape parade in honor of the Giants' Super Bowl XLII victory at the Canyon of Heroes in lower Manhattan.

According to a team spokesman, in 2001, 49 percent of the Giants' season ticket-holders lived in New Jersey. Most of the remaining ticket holders lived in New York State with some coming from other states.Through the lean years of 1960s and 1970s the Giants, in spite of a 17-year-long playoff drought, still accumulated a 20-year-long waiting list for season tickets. It has been estimated that the Giants have a waiting list of 135,000 people, the largest of any franchise.