It's one of the most expensive tickets in sports, but good luck getting your hands on one.
We're just a couple of days away from the Super Bowl, when the Philadelphia Eagles will attempt to keep the Kansas City Chiefs from becoming the first team in history to win three straight Lombardi trophies.
This year's game will take place in the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, which has a capacity of 83,000. But chances are, unless you know somebody, you're not going to be able to find a ticket for the biggest NFL game of the year.
That's because of the 83,000 tickets for this year's game, the NFL made exactly ZERO of those available for purchase by the general public.
It's no surprise that the league tightly controls the tickets for their biggest game of the year. But few of those tickets will even make it into the hands of fans at all because of how the league allots tickets to the Super Bowl.
Because the game is played at a neutral site, the NFL controls all of the tickets to the Super Bowl. Of the 83,000 tickets, 17.5% go to each team participating in the game, meaning the Chiefs and the Eagles each received around 14,500 tickets each.
Of those tickets that go to the participating teams, each player and coach on the team gets two tickets, with the option to purchase 13 more at face value. If a player needs more than 15 tickets though, they're going to have to fight for them on the secondary market like everybody else.
After the team's allotment is distributed to players, coaches, front office execs, staff, teams can then decide how to make the remaining tickets available to fans, with most teams choosing to use a lottery to offer them to season ticket holders for purchase.
The NFL also offers 5% of the tickets to the host team, meaning the Saints will receive around 4,000 tickets to this year's game. And the other 29 teams in the league each receive 1.2%, or around 1,000 tickets each, meaning that the teams NOT playing in the Super Bowl account for 40% of the tickets in the stadium.
The other 25% of tickets are reserved for the NFL to hand out to - you guessed it - corporate sponsors and VIPs.
Add it all up and you see why so few Super Bowl tickets ever hit the market for fans to scoop up, and why the price is so high when they do.
As of right now (around 3:30 on Friday), the cheapest ticket for the Super Bowl on StubHub and SeatGeek are listed at around $2,600. But they go up to over $10,000 the closer you get to the field.
All that to say, most of the people in the stadium for the Super Bowl aren't there because they're football fans, but because they have a connection with the team or the NFL, whether that's through a player or sponsorship. And it's led to quite a bit of criticism in recent years that the Super Bowl has become an event that's only for the "elite" and not for your diehard football fans.
NFL Chief Media and Business Officer Brian Rolapp discussed the market for Super Bowl tickets and the dilemma between offering tickets to the general fans and pricing them at a point where the league can maximize their profit:
"If you look at the secondary market, compared to what the face value of the tickets are, it's always a gigantic - so just basic theory of economics, we could price these tickets a lot higher than we actually do, and we make a conscious decision not to.It is an event we wish more people could get to."
I guess I'll just be watching the game at home this year - along with pretty much everybody else.
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