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NFL
Brian Mccarthy

NFL keeps grip on Super Bowl tickets, except for owners

Brent Schrotenboer
USA TODAY Sports
A look at the  tickets for Super  Bowl XLIX, to be played Sunday and Phoenix,  pitting the defending  champion Seattle Seahawks against the New England Patriots.

PHOENIX – The NFL has a pretty old and simple formula for determining who gets tickets to the biggest game in the world.

Officially, the league says that 75% of this year's estimated 71,000 Super Bowl tickets were given to its 32 clubs, with the other 25% retained by the league.

Unofficially, the league maintains a caste system of sellers and buyers.

"It's 100% about money and control," said Steve Pociask, president of the American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research.

In the high-flying era of StubHub, team owners and other league insiders are allowed to package those tickets at prices well above face value. As of Thursday evening, the average price list price was $10,919, the most expensive sports, theater or concert event ever tracked, according to TiqIQ, a ticket aggregator and reseller founded in 2009.

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But the rules are different for players and another 1,000 fans who are lucky enough to get the chance to buy Super Bowl tickets for $500. In those cases, the NFL tries to stop scalping. The fans can't scalp their seats at all because they're not allowed to leave the stadium after picking up their tickets.

"We want the fans who win the lottery for the tickets at $500 to attend the game at that price," NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said.

Pociask called the lottery system for fans "a PR stunt designed to make it look like the NFL is committed to giving average consumers a shot at going to the game at an affordable price."

It's an exclusive club for the Super Bowl ticket market, with the league, its owners and partners all in on it. The Super Bowl tickets that go to the teams often end up with sponsors and some season-ticketholders chosen by lottery. The league also sells tickets to media members, media partners and sponsors. So there is no doubt who supplies the vast majority of tickets in the secondary market.

"The only way (resellers) get (Super Bowl tickets) is from teams, sponsors, the season-ticketholders," said Paul Jones of SBTickets.com, a Super Bowl ticket reseller.

Money and control

It's a different world these days in the NFL, whose franchise owners are now allowed to reap huge profits from ticket sales after years of battling scalpers.

In 1981, then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle told the New York Times he considered scalping Super Bowl tickets a "tough problem. It's not healthy for the league, but it's part of the Super Bowl phenomenon." The league sought to crack down after reports of $40 Super Bowl tickets being sold for up to $500.

In 2002, NFL spokesman Greg Aiello addressed the rising popularity of online ticket reselling by saying the league viewed it as "unethical and, in some cases, against the law."

The league's view soon changed, as the continued pressure of the Internet economy made ticket reselling more widespread and legal on sites such as StubHub and TiqIQ. By 2008, the NFL had entered a partnership with Ticketmaster to create the NFL Ticket Exchange, the league's official ticket reseller.

Patrick Ryan, co-owner of a ticket brokering company called The Ticket Experience, said it's a case of "if you can't beat 'em, then join 'em," with the NFL sharing in the revenue with Ticketmaster and using sales data so as to maximize pricing in the future.

Early Wednesday, the NFL Ticket Exchange had 738 Super Bowl ticket listings ranging from $4,000 to $14,203 each, making a mockery of the league's face-value price range of $800 to $1,900. By Thursday evening, there were 149 listings ranging from $8,400 to $28,888.

Team owners and their clubs are allowed to sell the tickets above face value — the definition of scalping — as long as they include the marked-up tickets to travel companies and ticket vendors packaged as part of a sponsorship deal.

In other words, money received above face value isn't allowed to look like blatant scalping. But it's permitted if there is some other plausible explanation for that excess value — such as including other services, products or perks from the team.

"For secondary ticket vendors with sponsorship arrangements with clubs, the deal value can exceed the face value of the included tickets, provided that such excess value must be reasonably attributable to the elements of value (excluding tickets) included in the deal," said McCarthy, who said the same rule applies for travel packages.

For example, PrimeSport, a sports travel company in Atlanta, has deals with several NFL teams to be their official travel partner, including the Seattle Seahawks, who play the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl on Sunday. The company offers travel packages to the team's games, and this week was selling dozens of Super Bowl tickets on its website, ranging from $3,600 to $9,000.

The league also has its own hospitality and event business called NFL On Location, which offered luxury Super Bowl travel packages this year that ranged from about $5,100 to $13,000, including amenities such as an open bar and hotel.

QuintEvents, a service provider for NFL On Location, said this year they built a 20,000-square-foot suite, the largest ever for a Super Bowl.

Brian Learst, the CEO of QuintEvents, told USA TODAY Sports that 1,100 tickets were packaged for the suite at University of Phoenix Stadium. He said the tickets, provided by the league, had a face value of $2,500 and packages ranged up to $10,000.

Exclusive club

The NFL declined to reveal details of its deals, such as its revenue-sharing arrangement with Ticket Exchange.

But as business partners with these companies, a high-priced ticket market is good for business. Pociask said he noticed that the Ticket Exchange has price floors on NFL game tickets, but not price ceilings, to help keep prices and profits up.

By contrast, NFL players and staff generally aren't allowed to play the Super Bowl market and are restricted from it much like the 1,000 fans from the general public. Those on the participating teams "are permitted to resell at face value," McCarthy said. Clubs can distribute no more than 15 tickets to any Super Bowl player or assistant coach.

Players from other teams also are allowed to purchase two tickets at face value "subject to reasonable safeguards to avoid scalping of tickets," according to the league's collective bargaining agreement with the players.

To enforce that rule, the NFL then recommends teams have their players pick up these tickets for purchase at the game site, making it difficult for them to resell. In 2005, the league slapped then-Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Tice with a $100,000 fine for scalping Super Bowl tickets.

That was then. Now it's big business for the league, or at least the ones allowed to scalp tickets.

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