The Washington Capitals will offer paper tickets to their season-ticket holders for the entire 2025-26 campaign, the team announced Wednesday.
Yes, that’s right, paper.
Caps fans won’t have to go up to the box office and say their phone died or make up some excuse to get a physical ticket. Instead, season-ticket holders will have a collectible representation of every game this season — tickets with unique imagery on them, instead of just an ugly font on ticket stock.
Physical tickets are much like airplane food. No one talked much about them when they were there, but once they were gone, it became a travesty.
Over the last 15 years, as tickets throughout sports and entertainment have gone from physical to digital, ticket collecting started to emerge as a new vertical in the hobby.
After tickets were the second fastest growing sector of PSA grading in 2024, the world’s largest grader created a separate office for intake to handle demand.
For collectors, not having a ticket to an event when something special happened — a no-hitter, a star's debut or a band's final concert — seemed like a “miss.”
Tickets hold more than just collectible value. There’s also sentimental value.
I remember years ago, when a father took to Twitter to ask the world if anyone had a physical ticket to the Mets game the day before — not because some historic feat occurred on the field, but because It was his first game with his son.
Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the Capitals' parent company, has a close relationship with cllct. Monumental is one of the clients in our consultancy, the first of its kind in the collectible space.
We have worked together to create special pieces, such as the limited-edition collectibles celebrating Alex Ovechkin's 895th goal with game-used net and ice products that will hit Capital One Arena shortly. Our partnership has also resulted in meaningful conversations about pushing the envelope.
When we met with the group about tickets, Jim Van Stone, Momumental’s president and chief commercial officer, had a bold suggestion: “Why don’t we just do paper tickets again for a year?”
There was silence in the room.
Soon, the questions started coming. Aside from the tickets actually working — they will contain an NFC chip that works just like a barcode — the team asked, “What has to happen in order for them to be collectible?”
So, we got on the horn with PSA’s chief ticket authenticator, Matt Fuller. The stipulation? Whether the tickets were used for entry or not, they had to be eligible to be used in the arena on the date of the game. That obviously means the tickets had to be printed before the game. And they had to have specific section, row and seat numbers (if not a suite) and those specific numbers could not be duplicated.
Once that was communicated, it was a go.
And so here we are. It’s happening for this season.
Ted and Zach Leonsis and their team have always been at the head of innovation, but in a way, this was more about building an environment where innovating meant going back to the past.
At cllct, we are so proud to be a small part of the conversation that inspires today’s teams, leagues and brands to think about how to execute with the collector in mind.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.