I understand your rationalizing cost analysis for the purchase of seats but you are leaving out the benefits of more seats. The more seats you have the lower you can set your prices. Lower prices attract a larger percentage of the population, it becomes affordable for lower income families.
Your arena is one of the ones I'm aiming to build mine like actually.
No, my fan survey is terrible. I drew the best team for my TV games (1 ball). 10 wins and making it to the sweet 16 in the US Tourney got me a ball and a half for last season success and if I don't beat my rival tonight that's 1 ball too. Transfers is at 2 balls. Hopefully my better (and cheaper) PR staff can help that.
All that said, at any point it gets ineffective cost-wise if you continue building seats. My plan is to build more Courtside and Lower seats with the money I have sitting around, but I can't right causethe seats I have aren't selling. Three seasons since expanding my Lower Tier and I'm still paying them off. Everyone else my not expect to get paid back dollar for for their investment, but they are trying to race to NBBA with no foundation. I will have an arena optimized for my level (hopefully DII) and a pile of money I can send on young trained players that I can find as I move along. I'd rather have 3 million in the bank then to have the "potential" to carry a higher wage build, but that's just my preference I guess.
My 15k arena currently is 9th in overall size in my league but 6th in LT+CS+LB.