The Indianapolis Colts and FanDuel have announced a new ticket package for the upcoming season that integrates credit towards making bets on the sports betting platform, believed to be the first of its kind in the United States. The move comes as legal sports betting appears to have reached a tipping point in the United States, including the announcement of FanDuel as one of three official sports betting partners of the NFL earlier this year.
Dubbed the Colts FanDuel Pass, the package includes tickets to four preselected regular season home games, along with $25 per game in credit towards gaming action on the FanDuel sports book app. The slate of games for Colts fan to choose from comes in two flavors: Seattle, Tennessee, the New York Jets and New England, or Los Angeles Rams, Houston, Jacksonville, and Las Vegas. There doesn’t appear to be the option to mix-and-match games, and the home game against the defnding Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers is not included in either package.
Naturally, those hoping to purchase these passes must be 21 years of age or older, and must have (or create) a FanDuel account to take advantage of the betting credit. Colts ticketing officials believe the package will help them draw a younger demographic that is interested in sports betting.
“FanDuel is a sizable partner of ours, so we’re routinely looking for activation ideas that work for them. Data shows that legal sports betting folks generally skew younger.” Colts sales and marketing officer Roger VanDerSnick says. “This is an idea that been percolating on for a while in other forms, but this is how it materialized. We pitched it to FanDuel and they liked it—our ticketing group loves it.”
Tickets for the games in this package are not specific in the way that season tickets are, and will be assigned based on availiable seating in the stadium’s Terrace level 48 hours prior to kickoff. Betting credit is limited to $100 per account, so purchasing a set of tickets for multiple individuals would require an equal number of FanDuel accounts to take advantage of the full value, making for a potentially large-scale boon in account creation for the sports betting vendor, which is joined by Draft Kings and Caesars Entertainment as official sports book partners of the league.
“What FanDuel is really doing is they are aligning themselves with the Colts in a creative manner—this likely being only one part of the activation between the parties. There will be other components,” says Mark Ganis of Chicago’s Sportscorp Ltd. “The key for FanDuel is to get new customers. The key for the Colts is to get revenue and sell all their tickets. They have a heck of a home schedule this year to do that.”
Indianapolis is also expected to announce details of plans for sports betting spaces at Lucas Oil Stadium prior to the season beginning.
