NFL will reimburse those with seating problems at Super Bowl XLV (Part 1)
There’s great news for the roughly 400 of you who didn’t get a seat in the Super Bowl, even though you had tickets.
The National Football League (NFL) knows that it was horrible that you guys flew down to Arlington, Texas, booked hotels, bought tickets and spent money on other expenses just to attend the Super Bowl, which you didn’t get in to. That’s why they are offering
two options to make you guys feel better.
But for those of you, who don’t know what happened, the NFL had planned to sell tickets for 13,000 temporary seats that were being erected behind each of the end zones.
Hours before the start of Super Bowl XLV between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers, the Arlington Fire Marshall inspected the seating and said that 1,260 of those 13,000 seats were unsafe.
The league then scrambled to find seating for those displaced fans, but only about 800 of them were able to be seated.
Those 800 fans were moved to standing room only areas or seats from where you couldn’t even see the field. Because of those 800 seat changes, 1,200 other fans were also disturbed, either being moved or excessive spectators squeezed into the standing room
areas, like sardines in a can.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has started a review of the incident, from seating problems to icy conditions to entrance issues.
So what’s the NFL doing for them? Well, about 2,000 fans, who didn’t have a good view of the field will be given either a full refund of their ticket or a free ticket to a Super Bowl that they wish to attend in the future. But many believe that the league
is doing this because a lawsuit was filed against them.
Fans that had bad views of the game or didn’t have seats at all filed the lawsuit against the Dallas Cowboys, their owner Jerry Jones, Cowboys Stadium, the NFL and a couple of other defendants.
The federal lawsuit claims deceptive sales practices, fraud and breach of contract on behalf of the people who had “illegitimate” seats or had to watch the game on extra televisions set up to accommodate them.
One of the plaintiffs, Steve Simms, came from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was among the 400 that did not have a seat. The other one, Mike Dolabi, has season tickets for the Cowboys and says that many season ticket holders were forced to sit in metal folding
chairs with no view of the field or the stadium’s enormous video board.
Their attorney, Michael Avenatti of Los Angeles, expects the lawsuit to cover around 1,000 people. He is a season ticket holder for the Cowboys and, although he wasn’t personally affected, he heard plenty of complaints.
Check out the next part to see what other havoc the NFL and Jerry Jones caused in an attempt to break the Super Bowl attendance record.
Continued in Part 2
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