by The top seeds Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles are well on their way to a Super Bowl ticket price worthy of the matchup between the two best teams in the NFL.
After a slight drop in ticket prices following conference championship games, Super Bowl LVII seats saw an increase over the course of the week: The cost of “admission” to the game rose from $5,600 per ticket a week ago at about $6,000 on Monday morning. “Enter” prices reflect the cheapest seat in the stadium, including brokerage fees.
According to data from online ticket marketplace TicketIQ, that $6,000 milestone keeps Super Bowl LVII among the most expensive “in” tickets in Super Bowl history, ranking behind only the 2020 Super Bowl between the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers at Miami (which hit $6,603) and the 2015 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks in Glendale (which netted a record $8,764, due to a ticket speculator meltdown). The all-time third-place finish represents high demand, despite the Chiefs and Eagles both winning Super Bowls in the past five seasons, not to mention Glendale’s lack of rotating tourist attractions like Miami and New Orleans.
In what has become an extremely well-regulated inventory market for Super Bowl tickets, it’s indicative of two things: Chiefs and Eagles fans live up to expectations that they would travel for this game; and NFL Super Bowl ticket demand continues to show strong showing following the reduced-capacity COVID-19 pandemic game in 2021.
Interestingly, the average ticket price for Super Bowl LVII has remained fairly stable, falling only slightly since the conclusion of conference championship games. After the AFC and NFC title games on Jan. 29, the average ticket price for Super Bowl LVII was about $9,720, according to data from TicketIQ. That average price has now dropped to around $9,400 as we approach “Moving Monday,” the Monday before the Super Bowl, which some brokers say is a line that begins to show how prices will go over the course of the week. Inventory across secondary market platforms has also been fairly consistent, with a total of around 2,500-2,700 tickets available each day over the past week.
It’s a far cry from the volatility in ticket prices the last time this game was in Glendale. Eight years ago in Super Bowl XLIX, this same site hosted the biggest panic in the history of the game. This was largely due to secondary market speculators betting against Super Bowl ticket prices for the 2015 game and spending months selling tickets they didn’t have in hand. The theory behind short selling was simple enough: sell seats to buyers months in advance, then fill orders close to play, and make a profit by picking up seats cheaper than they had already sold. The only problem: The market has gone the other way and a stranglehold on inventories has sent prices into the stratosphere.
Speculators who sold seats for the game up front for $2,500 to $4,000 suddenly scrambled to fill orders that were soaring to between $8,000 and $9,000 per ticket. The “breakup” has led some speculators to post losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Some refused to fulfill orders and instead went out of business, losing everything in arguably the biggest Black Swan event in ticket sales history.
While this is unlikely to happen again in Super Bowl history, that doesn’t mean tickets can’t still see sizable price increases later in the week. How that plays out remains to be seen, but brokers will be watching very closely over the next 48 hours to see if the trend dips or pushes into record territory.
