Super Bowl tickets are cheaper than they were last year. You can thank the Patriots for that.
On average, tickets were selling for $2,879 on Monday, according to SeatGeek, a search engine that tracks online sales.
That’s down 20% compared to the same day last year. And it’s actually 18% cheaper than what Super Bowl tickets were selling for on Saturday, before Sunday’s games decided the match-up: New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks.
The price drop is mostly due to “Patriots Super Bowl Fatigue,” said Connor Gregoire at SeatGeek.
The team has reached the Super Bowl six times in the last 14 years. Some New England fans may have gotten used to watching their team play from their living rooms. Others might not want to shell out the big bucks to go in person, again, especially when this year’s game is being played across the country in Arizona.
“As the Patriots started to pull away during the game on Sunday, that’s when the price drop started to accelerate,” Gregoire said.
The cheapest ticket sold on Sunday cost about $1,600.
Getting a ticket to the Super Bowl is tricky business. Only 1,000 are sold to fans at face value. The rest are divvied up among the league — which gives a lot to corporate sponsors — and the teams, which end up using brokers to sell them on the secondary market.
Savvy buyers tend to hold out until the last minute. The day of the game is actually the busiest in the resale market, Gregoire said.
He expects prices to settle this week and slowly decline until a more dramatic drop three of four days before the game on February 1.