Oakland A’s COO Leaves Team, Forms Ticketing Company
BaseballIndustryMLB
January 16, 2020
Olivia Perreault 1
The Oakland Athletics’ chief operating officer, Chris Giles, has left the team and started a new venture – forming his own ticket company.
The A’s announced that Giles would be departing the team, with team president Dave Kaval noting in a statement that the team would like to “thank Chris for his contributions to the A’s and wish him the best in his future endeavors.”
Giles was behind the club’s revenue-generating operations, including sales, marketing, partnerships, public relations, and community involvement. He also led the A’s Access program, which replaced the team’s standard season ticketing plan with a monthly membership program. The pass would charge fans a monthly fee based on how many games they wanted to attend, which ranged between 10 and 81 games throughout the season.
Following the success of the program, which saw 18,000 register, Giles decided to start his own firm to help other teams adapt the membership program. The new firm, dubbed Greenfield Sports Group, will market a similar, customized membership to other franchises, along with a software that would allow teams to execute the programs.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Giles said that it’s a “fundamentally new approach to ticketing.”
“There’s a lot of interest from other teams and properties on how to be able to do that,” he said. “As an industry, we need to start thinking about what teams can sell that can’t be replicated through a secondary market transaction.”
Not only did the program garner 18,000 memberships, but the team also saw its attendance rise from 19,427 in 2018 to 20,521 in 2019.