A little less than two weeks ago, a number of people who trade Super Bowl tickets like stocks did what they’ve been safely doing for at least five years: They sold away a bunch of tickets that they didn’t yet have. This year, the trusted maneuver was not so safe, and left some sellers short tens of thousands of dollars.
What these sellers were banking on was that between the time when they sold the tickets and when they actually had to deliver them to their customers, the price of the tickets in the secondary market (think StubHub) would drop significantly. If all went according to plan, these speculators would wait for the price to drop before actually acquiring the tickets and only then send them off to their buyers—making good money in the process. In years past, ticket prices have fallen on average $921 during this two-week window, typically from something on the scale of $4,000 to $3,000.
This year, that fall never came. As they had in years past, ticket brokers began posting for-sale offers (for tickets they didn’t yet have) through online clearinghouses such as StubHub and Vivid Seats shortly after the AFC and NFC championship games, which is historically when prices have peaked. They then sat back and waited for ticket prices to drop. Instead, prices shot up dramatically. Tickets' face values range from $800 to $1,900; the cheapest ticket on StubHub, as of Friday, was over $10,000, having dropped to about $8,000 since then.
Changes in the Price of Super Bowl Tickets on Marketplaces Like StubHub, by Year
It's not entirely clear what caused this spike in price. It might have been a result of heightened demand, which tempted brokers to make too many promises they couldn't keep. StubHub has its own theory. On Thursday, the company issued a press release suggesting that the people who sell off the tickets to brokers—fans who won the tickets in the NFL's lottery, or employees of companies sponsoring the Super Bowl, for example—colluded to restrict supply and drive up prices, like the OPEC of football.
Now, brokers are left in a tricky position. They can either buy tickets at a serious loss in order to provide their customers with what was promised, or they can flake on their customers and take a hit to their reputation. (StubHub, for its part, lightly polices speculation by requiring that brokers post the seat and section numbers—proof that they have the ticket in hand—a few days before the event itself. However, it's clear from the past two weeks that this is of limited use.)
Suffice it to say that not many of these brokers will be doing this again next year. “At the end of the day, many brokers took a big hit from this, while very few made a profit,” says Chris Matcovich, vice president of data and communications at the ticket-price aggregator TiqIQ.