Venue News: NFL Offers Seatless Ticket Holders Tix to 2012 Super Bowl

The National Football League offered 2012 Super Bowl tickets to disgruntled ticket holders left seatless at Sunday’s big game, as Texas officials downplayed the effects a series of snafus might have on their chances to snag future big events. About 1,250 fans who had traveled to north Texas to watch the Packers play the Steelers were told Sunday afternoon that the seats they had paid for weren’t available. For about 400 of those ticket holders, no other seats could be found. The seating snafu came after days of ice and snow that made travel difficult. North Texas’ hosting of the Super Bowl events began to look jinxed when six people were hospitalized after being hit by snow and ice that plunged off the roof of Cowboys Stadium in Arlington Friday…

…Angry fans outside a Cowboys Stadium fence chanted “Let us in!,” “Jerry sucks!,” and “We want seats!” while being denied inside access to Super Bowl XLV on Sunday. After initially being turned away at the gate, approximately 850 fans with tickets in temporary seating sections were relocated to similar or better seats for the game between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers. After the game started, the NFL said another 400 fans who were not accommodated with seats in the stadium were eventually taken inside to watch the game on monitors in the North Field Club behind the Pittsburgh bench…

…Indianapolis officials preparing to host Super Bowl XLVI have two words of advice for potential visitors concerned about the impact of winter weather. Just chill. Although Mother Nature played a cruel trick on North Texas organizers, who were dealt a major setback by the coldest weather to hit the region in more than 20 years, Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard has no doubt about his city’s ability to handle winter’s worst. “We know how to do the snow,” he says. “We do it very well. We do it routinely. That should not be an issue.” Eighty percent of the city’s existing snowplows have been replaced to make sure of that. It will help, too, that next year’s Super Bowl might be the most central in the event’s history…

…Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs) Football Club released the first image this week of the proposed 60,000-seat venue the club hopes to build on the site of London’s Olympic Stadium. Tottenham is bidding with American sports and entertainment giant AEG against Premier League rival West Ham for the right to move onto the site after the 2012 London Games. A decision is expected later this week. Tottenham’s plans have been criticized because the £537 million Olympic Stadium would be largely dismantled to build a facility without a running track, making it more suitable for football…

…Houston Dynamo minority owner Oscar De La Hoya joined city and county officials this week at the groundbreaking for the team’s $95 million, soccer-specific stadium. The 22,000-seat venue will sit near downtown, within walking distance of Minute Maid Park, the Toyota Center, and the city’s massive convention center. Besides being home to the Dynamo, it also will host international soccer matches, Texas Southern University football games, concerts, and boxing matches. The Dynamo have been sharing Robertson Stadium, home of the University of Houston Cougars football team, since moving to Houston from San Jose, CA, in 2005.