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Across the country, ticket prices have skyrocketed, making it impossible for many to go see their favorite team play without spending a fortune.
Story Highlights
Taking a family to a soccer game could easily run into hundreds of dollars
Sports ticket prices increased 15% year over year
Owners would rather have a few wealthy clients than a whole crowd
(And don’t even ask about Super Bowl tickets, which will be the most expensive ever recorded. Track: $9,000+)
Ticket prices have risen far beyond inflation in recent decades, and much of it has been intentional. Teams create a limited supply of seats, and increased competition for those seats among people with disposable income is driving up prices fiercely. Dynamic prices for tickets in ticket resale platforms and new overbuilt stadiums and arenas with more luxury suites and premium seats they have also raised prices.
That makes watching a game in person increasingly a luxury good. And that’s what the team owners and the major sports leagues want.
“Tickets are not something that everyone buys. What the NFL wants is a lot of money for about 70,000 people in one city,” said Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross.
Teams “don’t care if families can’t afford seats as long as they can still watch TV,” he said. Major sports leagues make about two-thirds of their revenue from television deals.
Consumers have shifted their spending toward services and away from goods, spending more on concert tickets, amusement parks, sporting events and other experiences since the height of the pandemic subsided. In sports, the impact has been enormous: Last year, attendance records were broken at everything from women’s volleyball games in Nebraska to Lionel Messi’s MLS games.
Greater demand has driven up the prices of these events, a trend that some analysts have called “funflation”.
Todd Kirkland/MLB Photos/Getty Images
Truist Park is smaller than the former home of the Atlanta Braves, putting pressure on prices.
Ticket prices for sporting events rose 15% in December from a year earlier, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In 2023, the average NFL ticket rose 8.6% to $120, according to Team Marketing Reporta sports market study company. It costs $631 to take a family of four to a game and buy food, two souvenirs and a parking spot.
MLB tickets increased 3.5% to an average of $37 in 2023. It costs $266 to take a family to a game.
It’s all part of a longer-term trend.
Between 1999 and 2020, ticket prices for sporting events grew more than twice as fast as general consumer prices, according to the BLS. Ticket prices were slow to recover in 2021 as stadiums reopened following pandemic closures. Many teams also reduced prices to win back fans. But prices have risen again.
Some consumers may also be seeing higher prices on games due to ticketing platforms. Ticketmaster and StubHub use sophisticated dynamic pricing algorithms that change minute by minute based on demand. Teams such as the New York Yankees have entered participation in ticket resale platforms. These clubs see an opportunity to make more money by taking a cut of the secondary ticket sales between buyers and sellers.
The best games can “skyrocket because you have software that allows the inputs to be super flexible,” Matheson said.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports/Reuters
Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, home of the Super Bowl, is the third smallest stadium in the NFL.
Even though seats in stadiums are often empty, teams are reluctant to sell empty seats at rock-bottom prices. They worry that selling cheap seats as teams become more desperate to have fans in the stadium will drive people in the future to wait for lower prices before buying their tickets. Therefore, sometimes the seats are empty or covered.
The closing of the upper deck in Oakland helped the A’s raise ticket prices in the early 2000s, for example. The team limited the supply of tickets in hopes that it would create shortages and give fans the incentive to purchase tickets in advance. (The A’s are now leaving oakland for Las Vegas.)
“Teams don’t want fans to think they can get virtually free tickets if they wait until the last minute,” Matheson said. “If fans thought that, they would never buy tickets at full price.”
Many teams have also built new stadiums and arenas or remodeled existing facilities in recent decades. These new stadiums, many of which were funded by taxpayers, were built with reduced seating capacity compared to previous venues, allowing teams to charge higher prices.
There are more luxury suites for corporations and deep-pocketed fans than ever before, said Dennis Coates, a sports economist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
A little-known reason for that boom: Individual teams in many sports don’t have to share sales of premium seats and luxury boxes with the rest of the league, making them a key source of revenue, he said. Teams have to share other sources of income, such as money from lucrative television deals.
“The new generation of stadiums is designed to maximize the number of really good seats at the expense of a large number of cheap seats,” Matheson said. “You design arenas for a super premium experience. “There is no point in trying to create stadiums that have a large number of cheap seats.”
The new stadiums of the New York Yankees, Minnesota Twins, Florida Marlins and Atlanta Braves each have at least 8,000 fewer seats than their previous homes.
Five of the seven newest NFL stadiums have seats 71,000 or less.
The new Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, home of the Raiders NFL team and where the next Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers will be played on February 11, has capacity for 65,000 fans. Relatively small, that ranks 27th out of 30 NFL stadiums in capacity.