• Business

This Football Team Has the NFL’s Most Expensive Beer

5 minute read

If the price of a beer at an NFL game this season is any indication—and arguably it is—it’s little wonder the NFL is scrambling for ways to reverse a growing attendance problem in its stadiums. If you pair expansive, on-demand TV offerings with cheaper prices outside of stadiums, people will shy away from the vastly more expensive live experience.

Here at FindTheBest, we organized and connected data compiled by Team Marketing Report and Forbes to better illustrate a fan’s cost for attending an NFL game. We’ll start with beer before getting into the treacherous territory that is the total cost of attendance at an NFL game.

The below table is a snapshot of how NFL teams compare when it comes to the price of the cheapest draft beer at each stadium, independent of size. You can tap anywhere in the table to learn more about a given team or tap into the four headers to sort the list according to what you want to see:

The Most Expensive Beer Overall | FindTheBest

The Oakland Raiders—who are just 1-11 on the year as of Sunday morning—have the most expensive beer independent of drink size, followed in short order by the somewhat-adjacent San Francisco 49ers, whose move to a new home at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. prompted a 40.1% increase in the price of an average ticket.

Although the league averages a 16-ounce pint across all stadiums, the above table only tells part of the story. Breaking out that last column—the price per ounce of beer—is perhaps more telling.

Considering just the price of beer by ounce, these are the 16 teams with the most expensive beers:

The Most Expensive Beer by Ounce in 2014 | FindTheBest

This reordering is important since the mere price of a given stadium’s beer doesn’t describe how much value you’re getting out of that beer. A 20-oz. beer at a Raiders game is still pricey at $0.54 per oz., but it’s suddenly a little more palatable than the $0.71 per oz. being charged at a Philadelphia Eagles game (for a 12-oz. beer, that amounts to $8.50 per beer for the cheapest beer in the house).

That’s particularly pricey when you consider that a full 16-ounce domestic pint at your average local watering hole rarely would run that high even with a tip for the barkeep. Yet, the effect a football game has on your wallet gets even worse — Let’s turn to the total cost of attendance to see why.

Here’s the picture for the top 16 teams when it comes to the total cost of attendance, with “total” conservatively representing fairly basic purchases such as a beer, parking, the average ticket price, and a hot dog:

Total Cost of Attendance in the 2014 Season | FindTheBest

Of the 16 teams depicted, 10 have per-ounce beer prices of more than $0.44—the median per-ounce price for the league. Of these 10 teams, eight are in the NFC, with representatives from each division, as seen in the chart below:

Total Cost and Beer Value Overlap | FindTheBest

Assuming a fan attending a Dallas Cowboys game pays the average price for a ticket, buys one cheap beer, a hot dog, and parks one car, that fan can expect to drop almost $200 on seeing a game.

In fact, total costs using the above assumptions stubbornly stay above $100 for all but the four teams with the lowest total fan attendance costs (Miami, Detroit, Jacksonville, and Cleveland). Without the full range of ticket prices, we can only speculate as to how much pull outliers might be having on the average ticket price, which is easily the biggest component of the total cost. With that said, the average ticket prices give us a baseline for comparison purposes.

The average NFL fan pays top dollar just to watch a game and eat a meal, which speaks for itself. But these prices don’t even begin to factor in considerations like team brand premiums and the cost of new stadiums. Prices don’t exist in vacuums.

Looking at some of the clubs with the highest total fan costs, Dallas, New England, and Washington have the three highest-valued franchises in football ($3.2 billion, $2.6 billion, and $2.4 billion, respectively). While the 49ers are worth less from a valuation standpoint ($1.6 billion), they’ll be dealing with the debt from their new $1.31 billion (before interest) stadium in all sorts of ways for years to come.

This article was written for TIME by Ryan Chiles of FindTheBest.

More from FindTheBest:

Did Corey Kluber Deserve to Win the Cy Young Over Felix Hernandez?

Strongest NFL Players According to Madden NFL 15

2014 Editors’ Choice: Best Cars

More Must-Reads From TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com