Analyzing NFL Ticket Prices
Analyzing the ticket market as a whole, how the NFL relates to other sports, and how the prices could be lowered.
$274. That is the cheapest ticket for the upcoming Chiefs Bears NFL game according to TickPick. Fans are losing their opportunity to support their teams because of these high prices, but why are these tickets so expensive? To answer this question, we must first look at other sports and how they relate, then explain how these ticket-selling websites actually work, we will go over why the NFL seems to be the outlier, and finally, look at ways that prices can be cheaper.
Firstly, we need to look at other sports and their relative ticket prices. For our sport in discussion, the NFL, ticket prices average about $150, the only sport to average over $100 per ticket. According to RookieRoad.com, the next highest sport is the NBA at $94. It is important to note that these average prices often are jacked up because of a major outlier; courtside seats. These tickets can run up thousands of dollars, so their existence makes the average NBA ticket a whole lot more. The next sport is a Canadian classic, hockey. NHL tickets average about $83, a respectable amount. Finally, the cheapest of the four major North American sports is baseball. The MLB tickets average at a low of $36. This is most likely because of the vast amount of games in a season.
So how do these ticket websites come up with these prices? Well, it's not really the website at all. The websites are simply a machine, or tool, for reselling highly sought-after sporting event tickets. While there is a good amount of innocent people simply trying to sell the tickets and recoup the money, there is also a subgroup of more mischievous activities. According to The Guardian, “These traders use a variety of methods to harvest hundreds of tickets before genuine fans can get hold of them. They can list them in bulk on the secondary platforms and cash in from the comfort of their homes.” There have been a few actions taken by the government to limit this activity and time will tell whether these prices can be lowered and limit this sketchy activity.
The NFL is the outlier for a few key reasons. One of those is because there are only 17 NFL Games a year per team. That means that there is already a low supply of entertainment, so the demand will be high, meaning prices can be raised. For an opposite example, Major League Baseball has the cheapest tickets, and that is due to the fact that baseball plays a whopping 162 games a year per team. Another reason the NFL is more expensive is because of how popular the NFL has become. According to Forbes, “Sports accounted for 94 of the 100 most watched telecasts last year. The NFL alone accounted for a record 82 of the 100 telecasts.” The fact that the sport is so popular means that people will pay to go see it in person.
Finally, will these high prices ever be lowered? There are a couple of ways that we could see these ticket prices lowered in the future. The most negative one would be if the NFL lost its popularity or faced more competition. This would drive up supply, lowering the average ticket price. One other way we could see prices lowered on these websites is if the government stepped in to try and limit people from scooping up all the tickets at a cheap price, then reselling them for massive profit, then repeating the princess every week. It would be nice to have a free market for ticket sales, but there are always people trying to play the system in every field and it has to be controlled for the betterment of fans.
In conclusion, we should care about this because families shouldn’t have to spend a fortune to take their family to a sporting event. We all have been to an event, either as a kid or recently, and that should not be taken away from the younger generation. If it does get taken away, then live sporting events will die out.