© 2024
NPR News, Colorado Stories
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Super Bowl Tickets Are 'Cheap,' And Weather Isn't Only Reason

Tickets? Tickets? Anybody need tickets? Some are available to Sunday's Super Bowl in New Jersey at "bargain" prices.
Charlie Riedel
/
AP
Tickets? Tickets? Anybody need tickets? Some are available to Sunday's Super Bowl in New Jersey at "bargain" prices.

Sure, the game-time temperature's going to be in the low-30s or high-20s at Sunday's Super Bowl in New Jersey.

But brokers say that's not the only reason why tickets to the game aren't going for super-high prices on the websites where they're being resold.

"The issue with the weather is one thing, but the teams are not drawing," Lance Patania, president and CEO of Prominent Tickets, a ticket brokerage in Glen Rock, N.J., tellsUSA Today.

Denver's Broncos and Seattle's Seahawks, he says, just don't have "huge fan bases."

The game, of course, has officially been sold out for months. To get tickets, you have to go to brokers or the NFL's official resale site. The prices being paid for those seats are a gauge for how "hot" a particular Super Bowl is or isn't.

As of early afternoon Tuesday on the NFL Ticket Exchange website, the cheapest tickets we could find were for two seats in an upper deck end of MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. They were selling for $1,400 each. While that's a hefty premium over the $500-each face value of the game's least expensive tickets, it's well below the $3,000 or more that such seats commanded a few days before other recent Super Bowls, USA Today adds.

On early Tuesday afternoon, the cheapest tickets to Sunday's game were going for $1,790 each.

Those prices are well below what was expected just a week or so ago.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says that according to the third-party vendor SeatGeek, "prices for Super Bowl tickets are now in a full-on nosedive, with prices falling by over 40 percent from where they were immediately following the conference championship games."

As we imply in our headline with the quotation marks around the word cheap, the downward trend still isn't making Super Bowl tickets affordable for most of us. And it is worth noting that on the NFL Ticket Exchange someone's trying to resell eight tickets down low near the 50-yard line for $25,572 each. We hope they come with seat warmers.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.