Super Bowl Fans Buy Tickets that Brokers Did Not Have

While tens of thousands of fans packed University of Phoenix stadium to watch the Patriots defeat the Seahawks in  Super Bowl XLIX, several hundreds who had purchased tickets to attend the game did not receive admittance. The reason? The tickets that they bought through brokers did not exist when they paid for them. This year, major ticket brokers on websites such as StubHub and Vivid Seats continued to do what they have been doing for the past several years. That is, speculating on the potential price drop of ticket prices in the days before the game. Traditionally, Super Bowl tickets reach their peak price weeks before the game happens, and slowly drop until they are a fraction of that price in the days before the game. This leads brokers to sell as many tickets as they can during that period of peak pricing, even ones that they do not have yet. Ordinarily, prices would follow their usual pattern and brokers would be able to purchase the tickets they had already sold right before the game and make a massive profit. This year that was not the case.

In the last few days before the big game, tickets saw an exponential increase in prices. According to this article, the cheapest seats to get in the stadium on Sunday were about $9,000. This was bad news for brokers who had already sold these tickets in the $4000-$5000 range. At this point these brokers had a few options. They could live up to their word and take a massive financial hit providing customers with the tickets they had purchased, or they can fleece their customers and take a hit to their reputation. Unfortunately for many fans that were planning on attending the game, most chose the latter option. While many brokers offered refunds for the tickets, many fans were left out of the game and disappointed.

Ticket Prices through the month before the Super Bowl in the past six years