Why are Super Bowl Tickets so Expensive?

Super Bowl tickets aren’t like concert tickets. The system for distributing and selling Super Bowl tickets is closely controlled by the NFL, and the best way to get a ticket is either to be related to Tom Brady or cough up a lot of money. In 2022, even that might not be enough. You can’t camp out the night before or constantly refresh your computer screen waiting for them to go on sale.

Resellers like StubHub and SeatGeek work by connecting buyers with people who already have Super Bowl tickets. Ticket prices go up or down based on the number of tickets available and how many people want to buy them. Pricing for those tickets is pure supply and demand. Most often the sellers are team season-ticket holders who won a chance to buy the tickets, at somewhere around face value, through a team lottery. They then turn around and put those tickets up for sale through StubHub or SeatGeek or others.

Every team figures out how to split up its tickets among coaches and players, other team personnel, team season-ticket holders and various other team loyalists. That has changed some lately. After a 2020 season played amid the coronavirus pandemic, the 2021 Super Bowl – officially, it was Super Bowl LV – was held at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 31-9. The NFL provided 7,500 free tickets to vaccinated health care workers for that game and freed up an additional 14,500 tickets for others.

You could get a single ticket at that time on SeatGeek, but you would have had to pay more than $6,000 for it. Why are Super Bowl tickets so expensive? Other costs – like airplane tickets and hotel rooms – go up dramatically the closer you get to travel day. Ticket prices on the secondary, re-selling market do fluctuate. The Super Bowl is the most-watched sports event in the United States. They tend to spike right after the conference championships and fall as Super Bowl game day approaches two weeks later. In an interesting twist, Super Bowl ticket prices on the secondary market historically get lower as game day approaches. That said, you don’t necessarily want to wait until the last minute.

The Super Bowl is maybe the hottest ticket in entertainment. The Super Bowl has become, for a long time now, a national spectacle, expanding to include days of special events in the host city. In the year 2000, Super Bowl tickets still averaged less than $500 when adjusted for inflation. Tickets to the very first Super Bowl in 1967 cost an average of $10 (more than $83 in 2022 money). It’s consistently the most-watched sporting event on television in the United States. Ticket prices have expanded right along with it.

The decision came after discussions with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Florida Department of Health, and area hospitals and health care systems. It should be clear at this point that getting Super Bowl tickets is incredibly difficult and prohibitively expensive. For 2022, tickets might not be as easy to come by at newly built SoFi Stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. The only real options this year, and in most years, are to buy them online through the NFL or on the secondary or resale market. And that’s despite a seating capacity that might be pushed to 100,000 fans.