Since the NFL awarded a Super Bowl to Las Vegas in December of 2021, secondary ticket brokers have been dreaming about this game.
The math was simple: With a middling Las Vegas Raiders franchise drawing a significant premium for their home games versus the rest of the NFL (since relocating), the first Super Bowl in Vegas was an almost guaranteed land-rush for tickets. Any tickets. All tickets. Especially if that Super Bowl had some ideal circumstances mixed into the matchup. A set of conditions that, for example, might include one nationally popular franchise (hello, San Francisco 49ers), and one iconic superstar quarterback who is fast-becoming the NFL's answer to Michael Jordan (howdy, Patrick Mahomes). For the ticket market, that would be a very serendipitous pairing for a city that is the self-proclaimed entertainment capital of the world.
And now Las Vegas has it.
If the early returns on ticket demand are any indication, the fervor is living up to everything the secondary market sellers were dreaming of. According to reseller StubHub, the first day of sales data for Super Bowl LVIII represented a 150% spike over the 2019 season's matchup between the Chiefs and 49ers. Not only that, StubHub pegged demand as “trending 90 percent higher” than last year’s Super Bowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and Chiefs in the first 24 hours of sales. A whopping 26% of those early buyers were from California, showcasing how strongly 49ers fans have come out of the gate for this championship matchup (Kansas/Missouri accounted for 7% of StubHub sales in the early going).
“As predicted, the first Super Bowl in Vegas is seeing strong numbers. Sales are nearly double this time last year and early demand has far surpassed the last time Kansas City and San Francisco met in Miami,” said StubHub director of partnerships and business development Adam Budelli. “The 49ers fan base has rallied early, accounting for 26% of all tickets sold.”
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As you’d expect, that demand resulted in staggering early prices for tickets across virtually all reselling platforms. TicketIQ CEO Jesse Lawrence, whose platform is both a brokerage and tracker of prices across the market, pegged the early average ticket price at a whopping $10,752. In the first 24-hour window of selling, that’s the highest average ticket price in history, aside from the reduced capacity “COVID” Super Bowl in February 2021, which had an average ticket price of $15,253 — after the first day of sales when both Super Bowl participants had been determined. The least expensive ticket listed on the secondary market in the first 24 hours of sales for this year's game? According to Lawrence’s data, it was put up at $8,529. The most expensive? A suite seat located at the 30-35 yard line, for $60,130.
“If prices for this year’s Super Bowl were to hold,” Lawrence said, “the average price for this year’s game would be the most expensive Super Bowl of all-time — 2021 fell to $8,161 by game day — and 96 percent higher than the historical average for a Super Bowl. This jump in price is nothing new for the NFL in Las Vegas. … [T]icket prices for Las Vegas Raiders home games averaged $1,035 this season. [That is] 149 percent higher than the average ticket price for the rest of the league. If this Super Bowl ended up matching that increase, this year’s Super Bowl would end up with an average price of over $12,700.”
Of course, we’re still more than 12 days from Super Bowl LVIII. Prices have risen and dropped at titanic rates in the past with this game. But given this matchup, and the entertainment draw of the city that surrounds it, the final hammer on Super Bowl ticket prices could be the stuff of brokerage dreams for years to come.
