Yahoo Sports Super Bowl tickets at extremely low inventory; cheap seats rise to $8,500
PHOENIX – Forget about Sunday's clash between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks. Getting in to the Super Bowl might be the craziest game played this week.
On Wednesday night an already tight ticket market virtually vanished. The two biggest brokers of seats for Sunday's Super Bowl – StubHub.com and PrimeSport.com – went from a combined offering of 1,400 tickets Wednesday night to around 150 on Thursday morning. And that has sent prices for even the worst seats rocketing higher. The "get-in" nosebleed seats are now starting at $8,500 on StubHub.com, with field-level end-zone seats listed for as much as $21,533.25 each.
Multiple independent brokers told Yahoo Sports that StubHub is so starved for inventory, it has begun calling other independent brokers and offering to buy entire inventories of Super Bowl tickets.
But even having availability at this point is rare. PrimeSport, a significant ticket resale partner of the NFL, completely pulled its Super Bowl ticket inventory off its website, leaving visitors this message:
The lack of tickets has led to a frenzy among ticket brokers, who are scrambling to fill orders taken as far back as six months ago. One high-level broker described the rush as "like a stock market slaughter" for brokers.
Said another, "It's like a bank run, when the bank only has $100,000 and everyone has a million [dollars] that they want to get out."
There are a multitude of reasons being offered for why tickets aren't available. Most of them center on accusations that the NFL is engineering the shortage to weed out smaller brokers who have historically made healthy profits off Super Bowl tickets. By pushing out smaller brokers, it would likely leave more Super Bowl tickets in the hands of StubHub and PrimeSport, which have financial deals in place with the NFL and individual teams for selling Super Bowl tickets.
"This is the NFL and its partners trying to crush competitors, plain and simple," one large ticket broker. "This is all about who has the power over the market."
[Watch the Super Bowl live on Yahoo Sports and NBC Sports - Sunday at 6 p.m. ET]
One broker told Yahoo Sports that many NFL teams have waited until far later in the Super Bowl week to release tickets to players, coaches and business partners. He added that NFL teams have also been instructed by the league office to track who is receiving Super Bowl tickets from each team, and the "value" the team placed on each ticket. The NFL did not respond to a request from Yahoo Sports for information regarding the dissemination of Super Bowl tickets.
Brokers who pre-sold Super Bowl seats at $2,500-$3,000 are looking at booking massive losses if the market doesn't see a large influx of tickets come available in the next 72 hours. If that doesn't happen, some brokers could lose as much as $4,000-$5,000 a ticket filling orders, as they buy up marked-up inventory to fill what has turned out to be vastly underpriced pre-orders taken in 2014. One broker said some will absorb million-dollar losses, leading to fewer brokers willing to gamble on advanced orders in the future.
"Deals like this change the industry forever," one high-level broker said.
