Super Bowl Ticket Prices Are Triple What They Were Last Year

It’s not too late to get a ticket to Sunday’s Super Bowl match-up between the Patriots and the Seahawks.

But, if you want to go, it’s going to cost you. Ticket prices for the Big Game are skyrocketing, and not everyone's sure why.

The number of tickets for sale on the secondary market is especially low this year. Online reseller StubHub had less than 250 tickets for sale Thursday morning. Last year at this time, 4,000 were available.

Official channels aren't offering any more supply either. At the NFL Ticket Exchange shop in downtown Phoenix, a partnership with online seller Ticketmaster, employee Tamara Camp showed just how scarce tickets have become this year.

“We have 249 ticket listings with the bottom being $5,700 and the most expensive ticket being about $15,000,” she said.

That was Wednesday. By Thursday morning, the get-in price (broker jargon for the cheapest ticket that gets you into the stadium) had jumped $4,000, with only about 100 tickets for sale starting at $9,700.

The website TiqIQ.com said Thursday morning that Super Bowl seats are selling for an average of $8,051, up 192 percent more than they were this time last year.

It’s not clear what is driving the low supply. University of Phoenix Stadium seats roughly 10,000 fewer spectators than MetLife Stadium, where last year’s Super Bowl was held. That factors into the lower supply, and so does a shorter flight for fans of the defending champion Seattle Seahawks, but probably not enough to explain resale prices tripling year-to-year.

Some ticket brokers suggest the NFL is delaying the league's release of tickets to teams and sponsors, making it hard for them to list tickets on the secondary market until the last minute. Some brokers are hoping an eleventh-hour flood of tickets will bring prices back down. If not, many of them, who have pre-sold tickets expecting to be able to secure tickets on the secondary market, will face huge losses.

Amid the mad scramble of fans for Super Bowl tickets, the NFL is issuing a warning to fans Thursday to beware of counterfeit tickets.