Super Bowl LI ticket prices fall by 25% with Cowboys, Texans ousted
Super Bowl tickets became a little more affordable over the last two days.
Ticket prices dropped by about 25% on the secondary market with the Houston Texans — whose NRG Stadium will host Super Bowl LI on Feb. 5 — and the Dallas Cowboys falling in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs over the weekend.
The cheapest seats, known as the get-in price, could be had Monday morning for about $3,700, approximately $1,000 less than the get-in price when the weekend began. The average listing price on SeatGeek sits at $4,603, down from $6,109 on Friday.
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"Coming into this round of the playoffs, we had seen ticket prices holding a bit higher than we had ever previously seen with the possibility of two relatively local teams playing in the game,” SeatGeek spokesperson Chris Leyden said in an email to USA TODAY Sports. “With both now eliminated, I would expect prices to drop down below where they were last year, which was the most in-demand Super Bowl we had seen.”
TickPick, another ticket retailing site, has seen a similar drop in Super Bowl ticket prices.
"These are meaningful drops already, but we believe it's just the start as there's no real rush for sellers to drop their prices immediately,” TickPick CEO Brett Goldberg said in an email. “We expect to see prices drop consistently through the week and leading up to the Super Bowl."
Houston, as is usual for host cities, accounts for the most site visits on secondary ticket market sites. (On SeatGeek, for example, the Houston market comprised 40% of Super Bowl traffic to the site.) The Dallas-Fort Worth area was second, accounting for about 15% of Super Bowl ticket searches on SeatGeek.
"I would expect Dallas to slowly slide down that list with the Cowboys now eliminated," Leyden said.
Leyden said not to expect the Super Bowl ticket prices to totally bottom out given three of four teams left in the playoffs — New England Patriots, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Green Bay Packers — are among the most-followed teams in football. The other team, the Atlanta Falcons, are seeking their first Super Bowl title, which could boost interest in their home market if they advance.
The NFC and AFC championship games are also selling well.
Sunday’s Packers-Falcons game will be the final NFL game played at the Georgia Dome and ticket prices are averaging nearly $500. That's more expensive than last year’s NFC title game (Carolina Panthers vs. Arizona Cardinals). The contest looks to be the most expensive home game in Falcons history.
The Steelers-Patriots game in Foxborough, Mass., has a listing price of $636 as of Monday morning on SeatGeek, which could potentially make it the most expensive AFC title game in history.
