Vikings going exclusively to electronic tickets starting this season

Starting this season, the Minnesota Vikings are making a pretty significant change in how they allow people into U.S. Bank Stadium for home games.

The team has announced that they will be going exclusively to electronic tickets starting this season. They will no longer be accepting paper, printed-out versions of game tickets as they have in the past.

Jeff Anderson, the team’s director of communications, told Ben Goessling of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the switch was done for a number of reasons, most notably to improve communication between the team and the fans before and during games. The move is also being done with an eye towards security, as electronic tickets are significantly harder to counterfeit than paper tickets are.

Fans will still be able to sell their tickets through places such as StubHub and SeatGeek, and will not have to go through the team to sell their tickets to others. Anderson says that up to half of all Vikings tickets are sold or transferred to someone else before games. The team will also be able to use this information to give information and updates on things such as how long the lines are going into the stadium and helping people to navigate the stadium once they get inside.

For the more nostalgic among us, one of the downsides of this is going to be the death of the “ticket stub.” I know that I’ve got several ticket stubs from events that I’ve been to in the past, not necessarily all football-related. (Happy to report that my Dad found our ticket stubs from Game 7 of the 1991 World Series. So, I’ve got that going for me. . .which is nice.) I know that time marches on and all that, but it’s still kind of sad that the ticket stub appears to be going the way of the dodo.

What do you think about the team’s switch to strictly electronic tickets going forward?