NFL History | Ericsson Stadium, Charlotte — The Right to Buy a Ticket Paid for the Building

On 5 January 1997 the Carolina Panthers beat the Dallas Cowboys 26-17 in a divisional playoff game at Ericsson Stadium. The Pro-Football-Reference box score gives the venue as Ericsson Stadium, the attendance as 72,808, and the scoring as two touchdown passes from Kerry Collins, four John Kasay field goals, three Chris Boniol field goals, a Troy Aikman touchdown pass to Daryl Johnston, and a safety when a Carolina snap on a punt went out of the end zone. Carolina had gone 12-4 in the regular season, its second season of existence. A week later Carolina lost the conference championship at Green Bay, 13-30.

Tens of thousands of seats in the building had been sold before the stadium was built. What was sold was not a seat, and not a ticket.

A permanent seat licence is a one-time payment for the right to buy a season ticket for one particular seat, year after year, for as long as the holder keeps the licence. Andrew Dunn, writing for Axios Charlotte on 3 December 2015, describes it as a right and an obligation together: the holder has to keep buying the season ticket to keep the licence. On that description the licence is not itself admission; it is the right to buy admission.

The Associated Press, in its obituary of the Charlotte sports marketer Max Muhleman published on 19 December 2024, credits him with devising the permanent seat licence while working on the Carolina expansion bid, and reports that he delivered the closing pitch at the owners meetings of October 1993. The same account reports that the club founder Jerry Richardson wanted to build without taxpayer money, and that the league was uneasy about the debt that implied.

Two published counts of the sale do not agree. The Associated Press reports more than 55,000 licences sold. Axios Charlotte reports over 61,000, raising more than 150 million dollars, at prices running from 600 to 5,400 dollars. Both are describing the same offering, and this entry does not choose between them.

The construction cost is published two ways as well. Lynda V. Mapes, in a survey of stadium financing for the Spokesman-Review on 1 June 1997, puts the cost at 248 million dollars and reports that the city contributed land and road improvements worth about 60 million. Stadiums of Pro Football puts the cost at 242 million and the public and private split at 23 per cent and 77 per cent. The two accounts are not reconciled here.

What the arrangement did to the buyer shows up in the resale market. Axios Charlotte reports that Carolina licences have resold for as much as three times their initial price, that they had dipped below their original pricing as recently as 2010, and that sellers generally outnumber buyers. On those reports the instrument that paid for the stadium is an asset its holders can lose money on, and one that carries a recurring payment.

The club had no building at all for its first season. Pro-Football-Reference lists the 1995 Panthers home venue as Memorial Stadium in Clemson, a college ground in another state.

Mapes counted thirty stadium projects completed since 1987 in that same June 1997 survey, and set Charlotte against cities she reported had made weaker bargains, among them St. Louis, where she reported that city, county and state taxpayers paid the full cost. The comparison is hers.

Status note, September 2026. The building has been renamed since 1997. A Defense Visual Information Distribution Service caption dated 21 November 2021 gives the venue as Bank of America Stadium. Stadiums of Pro Football reports naming-rights payments of 7 million dollars a year running through 2024, and this entry does not establish what followed that term. The Associated Press obituary reports that the club still sold permanent seat licences at the time of writing in December 2024.

Coordinate. The pin is the United States Census Bureau TIGER geocoder match for 800 South Mint Street, Charlotte, North Carolina, at 35.225780, -80.850876, returned on the right side of the street segment. This is one federal record reached by one method. It is an interpolated address point on Mint Street rather than a surveyed point on the structure, and a second TIGER query at 100 South Mint Street returned 35.229428, -80.845759, a separate point along the same street; the two results move apart along Mint Street rather than clustering, which is the behaviour an interpolated segment should show. No municipal address-point layer was reachable for Charlotte. The stadium footprint lies west of the pin, and the precision radius is set at 300 metres to cover the seating bowl.

Cover image: soldiers of the United States Army Parachute Team, the Golden Knights, descending into the stadium at half-time of the Carolina Panthers game against the Washington Football Team, 21 November 2021. Photograph by Spc. Vincent Levelev, 49th Public Affairs Detachment, VIRIN 211121-A-ID763-1736, via the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. The photograph is not of the 1997 game. It is here because the seating bowl and the club signage are legible in it, and the seating bowl is the thing the licences paid for.