Off Wing Opinion

Only a few days after announcing they would require season ticket holders to use a Redskins affinity MasterCard to purchase season tickets by credit card, the Washington Redskins have ordered an abrupt about face:

An official with the credit card company said it had asked the Redskins to drop the requirement and to allow Redskins fans to use any MasterCard when they buy their seats, and that the team had agreed. MasterCard generally does not allow merchants to accept only one type of its co-branded or affinity cards over others, the official said.

The NFL Extra Points program, under which the NFL's 32 teams issue credit cards with their names on it, "is a new program, and while we have not made any determination that [the Redskins] were in violation of the rules or not, we have asked them to accept all MasterCard cards," said MasterCard spokesman Chris Monteiro. "They have agreed to do so and they will accept all kinds of MasterCards for this purchase."

Looks like the public pressure was effective, and perhaps MasterCard realized that many of their current customers might choose to pay by cash or check, rather than obtaining yet another MasterCard -- thereby taking some cash out of their pockets.

Thanks, as always, to Nick Sylvain for the link.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 at 5:30 pm by Eric McErlain and is filed under Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.