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Good news for those still looking for tickets. Ticket prices are expected to tumble to near face value.
What's up with this ASU economics professor? Calling Cardinals fans the worst fans in the NFL. He must be an Eagles or Steelers fan.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/134517
What's up with this ASU economics professor? Calling Cardinals fans the worst fans in the NFL. He must be an Eagles or Steelers fan.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/134517
Big game tickets may fall to Super-low prices
The Arizona Cardinals are in National Football League’s championship game thanks to a fourth-quarter march down the field for the winning touchdown. Now, fans might score great deals on Super Bowl XLIII tickets if they, too, can wait until the last minute.
Long before the Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers take the field at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium next Sunday, another battle will be waged to a stalemate: the never-ending conflict between supply and demand.
At the moment, demand is high — but supply is higher. As a result, say experts in the field of the secondary ticket market, disparagingly known as scalping, the price of a seat might be the cheapest in years.
“We’re going to see close to face-value prices,” said Sean Pate, spokesman for online ticket broker StubHub. “As I click over (to the Web site) every few hours, something cheaper shows up.”
This was welcome news to Gilbert resident Ralph Amsden.
He had Cardinals season tickets in the past, but gave them up this year because of the birth of his son. With Amsden’s team in the NFL’s title game — and playing the Steelers, his wife’s favorite team — sacrifices would be made.
“We’ve done a decent job of saving despite (the economy) and, to me, this is a worthy cause,” Amsden said.
But all sacrifices have their limits. Amsden’s ceiling was $1,100 per seat, and he was discouraged to find tickets going for about $1,800.
Yet when Amsden heard Pate’s prediction of tickets going for face value, he replied, “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”
As of Friday afternoon, the average price of a ticket listed on StubHub was $2,552. That is:
• Almost 28 percent less than the average price of a StubHub-sold ticket to last year’s Super Bowl XLII, held at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. History was at stake in that game, as the New England Patriots unsuccessfully tried for the NFL’s first 19-0 season.
• More than 36 percent lower than the average price for a Super Bowl XLI ticket. Pate said demand then was lifted by ravenous fans of the Chicago Bears, making their first Super Bowl trip in more than two decades.
• The lowest average price for a Super Bowl ticket sold on StubHub since 2004, when seats for Patriots-Carolina Panthers went for $2,290.
Said Pate: “These are prices normally reserved for a day or two before the game.”
Brian Dragos, a chef from Chandler, is relying on the market to do him right.
Much to his dismay, Dragos didn’t win tickets via the lottery for Cardinals season ticket-holders. At first, he couldn’t afford what online sellers were asking, but as the days went by, he noticed prices reaching a plateau.
“I have a broker friend who says the bottom is going to fall out after (Saturday),” Dragos said.
Pate said this could’ve been one of the most expensive Super Bowl tickets ever, had the Cardinals’ winning TD drive in the National Football Conference title game stalled out. Because the Philadelphia Eagles and Steelers have such passionate fan bases, that would’ve sent demand soaring.
Then again, Pate noted, had the Baltimore Ravens come back to beat the Steelers for the American Football Conference championship, ticket prices might be even lower than they are now.
Why are tickets for this game going so cheaply? According to Pate and Arizona State University economics professor Stephen Happel, there are a number of factors — and one of the biggest is the long-running ineptitude of the Cardinals that has created few die-hard boosters, and even fewer outside the state.
“Phoenix fans are known as the worst fans in the NFL,” Happel said.
But won’t Steeler Nation fill the void?
No, explained Pate and Happel, because Pittsburgh has been to the Super Bowl so many times — seven appearances, most recently in 2006 — the wavers of Terrible Towels no longer feel these games are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
Also, there are the matters of location and timing.
Happel said Arizona residents already live in a warm-weather city, so they can’t justify a potentially expensive vacation as an opportunity to get out of the cold.
Also, Arizona is in the grips of an economic recession, so many fans who find themselves with tickets are deciding to cash in that asset.
“If you’re out of work,” Pate said, “$4,000, $5,000 can go a long way.”
Others with seats are thinking a seat in front of a big-screen, high-definition television is preferable to compounding their spending on tickets with purchases of plane reservations, hotel rooms and rental cars, not to mention food, drink and merriment.
This is the situation in which Mesa resident Alex Fletcher found himself.
A Cardinals season ticket-holder for six years, Fletcher was awarded the opportunity for two seats in Tampa, face value of $500 each. He bought the tickets, checked the prices for flights and rooms … and then put the seats up for sale on Craigslist.
“I could go, but I would be broke for the next three months,” said Fletcher, who manages a skateboard/snowboard shop in east Mesa.
Fletcher already has plans for the money made from the sale: renewing his season tickets for the Cardinals, champions of the NFC and, perhaps in a week, the world.
