Super Bowl countdown: Fans lukewarm on title-decider tickets

New York is filled with firsts and superlatives

and this year’s Super Bowl is providing more.

The first outdoor Super Bowl in a cold climate, the first mass transit Super Bowl, a fanfest staged in the heart of Manhattan. People with tickets to the game on Sunday have tried – and to date largely failed – to cash in on the hoopla, undone in part by the location of the Super Bowl itself.

Since the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks won the right to represent their conferences, the average asking price of a ticket for resale has fallen by nearly 25 per cent to a little over $3,000 (€2,200) from just over $4,000, according to TiqIQ.com, which tracks resale prices online.

That is still pricey but the pace of decline suggests that ticket sellers may have overestimated the enthusiasm for watching the title decider in frigid weather. Moreover, fans in Denver and Seattle have to take long flights to get to the New York area.

Cold-weather experiment
"People are looking at the weather

and it’s not that appealing. And distance is a big part of it, too,” said Jesse Lawrence, chief executive of TiqIQ.

The game, of course, will be sold out and the price of tickets being resold online does not directly affect the National Football Leagues’s (NFL) bottom line. But it is one gauge of demand for this year’s game and the league’s broader experiment of holding it outdoors in a cold-weather city.

"The secondary market is very strong, but it has ebbs and flows," said Eric Grubman, vice-president for business operations at the NFL.

The league perhaps indirectly played a role in the secondary market when it changed the face value of some of the tickets to the game. This year, it lowered the price of the cheapest tickets to $500, from $650. Only 1,000 of them were sold, and only through a lottery that 30,000 people entered. The tickets must be picked up at the stadium on game day to prevent them from being resold.

The league also doubled the price of its most expensive tickets – seats that include access to indoor lounges – to $2,500.

Face value below $1,000
In MetLife Stadium

there are about 7,400 of these premium seats in the lower bowl of the venue. By raising the price of the face value of these tickets, the league unwittingly encouraged resellers to raise prices too.

Overall, said the NFL, 40 per cent of the tickets to this year’s Super Bowl have a face value of less than $1,000. The weather and the high cost of staying in New York mean “there’s effectively no way that this game will be the most expensive Super Bowl ever”, according to Will Flaherty, spokesman for SeatGeek, a ticket search engine.

Still, long-time ticket brokers have advice for those trying to cash in: Wait. Ticket prices usually dip in the days after the teams qualify for the Super Bowl, but they start rising again a few days before the game as fans arrive in the Super Bowl city keen to secure tickets.
New York Times Service