Free Sunday night? Got a few thousand dollars lying around? Why not go to the Super Bowl?
Tickets to the National Football League championship game are notoriously expensive, but statistically speaking, the day of the game is the best time to buy.
The price of Super Bowl tickets falls at the game gets closer
That’s according to data from SeatGeek, which tracks ticket prices in the resale market. The price of a single ticket can go as high as $29,000 but year after year, prices fall closer it gets to game day. The average price for a ticket to today’s game in Los Angeles was $5,915 yesterday, down 35% from the $9,151 tickets were going for a month ago.
Less than 90 minutes ahead of the game, tickets are listed on SeatGeek for as low as $3,600.
When Super Bowl ticket sales didn’t follow the trend
The exception to this trend was in 2015, when ticket resellers, counting on this pattern of declining prices, engaged in a naked short of the Super Bowl ticket resale market. Sellers were listing tickets they didn’t actually have while prices were high, counting on being able to buy cheaper tickets later to supply to the early buyers. When the short sellers all tried to buy at once close to the game, they drove prices back up since the number of remaining available tickets was lower than expected. Since then, more safeguards have been put in place to discourage ticket speculation.
At last year’s Super Bowl in Tampa, capacity was limited to 25,000 fans (plus 30,000 cutouts) due to covid-19 restrictions. This put a premium on ticket prices and made them some of the most expensive on record. This year, Inglewood, California’s SoFi Stadium is expected to be at full capacity of 70,000 people. But the fact that the game is taking place in the hometown of one of the teams, the Los Angeles Rams, means that strong local demand is likely to make prices stay higher right up till the end.