Do you want Super Bowl tickets? Why $5,000 is probably the new floor to get

In 2015, the last time the Super Bowl landed in Arizona, something unexpected happened. It wasn’t just a last-second Patriots interception at the goal line to preserve the victory or the Seahawks’ baffling decision not to feed Marshawn Lynch the ball in their fading moments. What fans and the football business also remember are ticket prices soaring, and brokers who assumed they would go down, could not, in many cases, deliver tickets and went out of business.

The terrain for Super Bowl tickets heading into next month’s return to Glendale is very different and much more expensive than when they were NFL He came to town eight years ago.

The ticket fiasco led to a concerted effort by the NFL to control more tickets and how they were distributed, resulting in price jumps. Prior to 2015, the cheapest Super Bowl ticket prices were generally a few thousand dollars (the only exception was the 2011 contest between Packers And Steelersluster coupling). But back in the 2008 title game in Arizona, entry prices were under $1,000 on game day.

“This was kind of like BC and AD in the ticket market,” Jesse Lawrence, CEO of ticketing platform TicketIQ, said at the point of demarcation that the 2015 Super Bowl represents. “There was a time before 2015 when you could buy a $1,000 ticket on game day to some Super Bowls. The new world we’re living in is this $5,000 product, you know, maybe starting at $5 on average order discount or match, and I think it goes up from there.”

Prior to 2015, swarms of ticket brokers would sell tickets ahead of time that they didn’t have in stock, expecting the price to drop within the two-week window as is normal. After the tickets are sold at a high price, they will buy at a lower price, distribute the physical tickets, and take advantage of the price difference. This is called short. But prices skyrocketed before the 2015 game and many brokers couldn’t afford the inflated numbers, leading fans to come to think they had tickets that never materialized.

Source: StubHub. * StubHub did not track the Super Bowl pandemic in 2021. For comparison, SeatGeek lists the average price for that game at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, as $8,609.

That drove prices even higher in the ticket scramble, which is why the 2015 game is the runaway leader for the highest average price for a Super Bowl ticket at $10,080, according to StubHub. That’s nearly $1,500 more than the 2021 pandemic game in Tampa, Fla., at Raymond James Stadium, which hosted at just 25 percent capacity.

“There was a lot of change going into the 2015 Super Bowl,” said Adam Bodelli, a StubHub spokesperson. “We lost, but not as badly as a lot of companies that unfortunately went out of business.” StubHub is now an official partner of the NFL.

The market for Super Bowl tickets has been very different in the nearly decade since the crash in 2015, and it’s much more expensive. They’re also all portable, so shorting the market is difficult, as tickets are usually delivered electronically when you buy them. The lowest prices are unlikely to fall below $5,000, and the average is thousands more.

The NFL moved to clean up the market after 2015, ensuring that more tickets would reach its On Location affiliate, which bundles Super Bowl tickets with hotels and experiences. On Location is now owned by Endeavor, but the NFL gives the company a license to source Super Bowl tickets.

“The NFL and on-site are really working on making the most of the profits,” Lawrence said. “They just decide it’s not a $1,000 product that they control. If they control the supply, they set the prices.”

On site controls up to 20 percent of event tickets. Those who fall out of the league stakes and from the competing teams. The two finalists each get 17.5 percent of the tickets, the home team—in this case, Arizona Cardinals – You get 5 percent, the other 29 teams get 1.2 percent each, and the league gets the remaining 25.2 percent. Players may also purchase two tickets at face value, which may come from their teams.

“With the NFL, On Location, as you know, there’s a lot of inventory kind of constrained to selling that entity,” said Patrick Ryan, co-founder and managing director of Eventtellect, a ticketing strategy firm. “And they’re doing a really good job of creating a very strong market.” Like many in his profession, Ryan now pegs $5,000 as the all-time low for the price of entry to Super Bowls.

This is not to say that matches don’t matter, but since experts like Ryan see the floor at $5,000, the pairing is more likely to affect prices in terms of how they go up rather than how they go down. He has the Cowboys or Invoices to the Super Bowl, that would likely drive up prices. In the case of the two Super Bowl teams, both the Eagles And heads It has a rabid following, so that will likely drive prices higher.

There may be small differences in prices Bengals I defeated the bosses. Star quarterback, star leader Patrick Mahomes It is usually seen as a bigger draw than the Bengals, but that may not be the case. SeatGeek director of consumer strategy Chris Layden, who spoke last week, predicted that demand is stronger for the Bengals than the Chiefs. Since last Sunday’s divisional playoff games, Ohio has ranked fourth among the states in which Super Bowl ticket searches come from SeatGeek, behind California, Texas and host state Arizona, he said.

“I really wasn’t expecting it because the Bengals made the Super Bowl last year. It’s a team that comes from a smaller market according to the NFL at least. I don’t think they have a big national brand like the Niners, for example,” he said. “But it appears, at least based on that metric, that Bengals fans are still hungry to go to the Super Bowl if their team can make another comeback.”

The idea of ​​fan fatigue – always successful team boosters, like chiefs, and audience fatigue – isn’t an issue. This is due in part to the still-pent-up demand for live events emerging from the pandemic. And the fan fatigue never showed when he didn’t show up Patriots They were on their way. The average price for the last Super Bowl in Atlanta, $4,119, was higher than in Minneapolis the previous year, at $2,948, according to StubHub (some of that can be attributed to the cold weather site).

No matter how much the Arizona Super Bowl ticket price settles for, it will almost certainly be dumped next year in Las Vegas. As the entertainment capital of the country, the city is also brimming with casinos that will want an allotment of tickets for the big players.

“They tend to have a decent tolerance for spending money to make these people happy,” Ryan said. This is the reason for the ticket prices Las Vegas Raidersdespite the losing record, was 50 percent higher than the NFL average.

“Vegas starts at a very high price,” said Ryan. “Compared to, say, Arizona, there’s really no inherent demand. … Phoenix vs. Las Vegas is pretty extreme.”

The money shelled out to get in on the game in Glendale could look like a bargain next February.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)