Super Bowl XLIX tickets: Why are they the most expensive ever?
Thanks in part to questionable reselling practices and hundreds of heartbroken fans, tickets for this year鈥檚 Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks are now the most expensive in the game鈥檚 49-year history.
The two biggest purveyors of tickets, Stub Hub and NFL Ticket Exchange, reported respective average Super Bowl XLIX ticket prices 聽hit $4,600 and $4,131.
鈥淚f those numbers even seem low, it's because most of the tickets sold before Wednesday, when the price skyrocketed,鈥� ESPN鈥檚 Darren Rovell 鈥淏y Thursday, it was nearly impossible to find a ticket for under $4,500. Come Saturday, scoring a ticket for less than $7,000 would be a feat.鈥�
Another vendor, TiqIQ, listed the average price as of Friday morning at $10,352 鈥� over three times last year鈥檚 $2,574 average, according to the company.
One might expect Super Bowl tickets to grow more expensive every year, but as from Fortune shows, prices have actually been flat or on the downswing for the past five years. 聽And they tend to fall markedly in the days leading to the game 鈥� on average in the last two weeks.
That trend has been so steady, in fact, that secondary sellers Like Stub Hub have for years been selling tickets before they actually have them. Such vendors make their money by selling a ticket at a certain price, and then, as the price drops, buying the tickets at the lower price and delivering them to the customer. The make their money from the price difference.
But this year, for聽 still-mysterious reasons, the prices never dropped Instead, they went up. That left resellers with a choice: Either buying the higher priced tickets at a loss, or refunding customers鈥� money, but don鈥檛 deliver a ticket. StubHub, which has a ticket guarantee,聽 lost an undisclosed, very large chunk of money buying up tickets. But who bought tickets from vendors without guarantees are missing out on the game 鈥� and those sellers are going bankrupt trying to refund their money, or avoid lawsuits.
It鈥檚 unclear whether the NFL will crack down on resellers to avoid such problems in the future, but there are things the league could do to alleviate issue, like releasing more tickets later in the lead-up to its biggest game.聽
