Super Bowl ticket prices are sliding despite the Chiefs going for a 3-peat and President Trump attending

NEW ORLEANS — Super Bowl tickets will never be cheap, but this week they’re certainly cheaper.

In a trend that hasn’t been seen since Super Bowl LIII — that featured the February 2019 matchup between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams in Atlanta — the early week “get-in” price for the cheapest available tickets is threatening to fall below $4,000. The get-in price represents the cheapest available ticket on the secondary market. According to market data from ticketIQ, Tuesday’s pricing for the rematch of the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles at the Caesars Superdome continues to dramatically drop. As of late afternoon Tuesday, a foursome of upper bowl seats were available for $4,122 each.

It’s an early surprise for a game that will feature two pieces of history: the Chiefs going for an unprecedented third straight Super Bowl win in the post-merger era, and the first instance of a sitting U.S. President attending a Super Bowl. The U.S. Secret Service announced Tuesday that President Donald Trump will be attending Sunday’s game, noting the presence of agents in New Orleans over the past week.

“Extensive planning and coordination have been in place to ensure the safety of all attendees, players and staff," Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement Tuesday. “Security measures have been further enhanced this year, given that this will be the first time a sitting President of the United States will attend the event.”

Thus far, the news of Trump’s attendance and the Chiefs’ reach for three-peat history hasn’t provided a boost in Super Bowl ticket pricing. Instead, tickets have continued to see a staggering drop from the conference title games and into this week — down more than 35% in the previous nine days. As of Tuesday, ticketIQ data also showed an average list price (the average of all available tickets) of $7,409, which is also down 33% since the day after the AFC and NFC title games.

In the larger picture, both of those numbers are dramatically below the Tuesday-before-the-game pricing of the past five Super Bowls. And they’re well off last season’s matchup between the Chiefs and 49ers, which had a price of $7,790 in the same timeframe. That trend has also hit the NFL’s hospitality provider, On Location, which is seeing its lowest Tuesday pre-game pricing since taking over the event in 2019.

This sets up two key questions for fans and brokers: Why are prices lower than usual and will they continue to decline?

Why are prices lower?

A wide variety of speculation was offered when Yahoo Sports surveyed a handful of national brokers about this year’s game in New Orleans. Some of the theories:

• The game being a rematch of Super Bowl LVII in February of 2023 — which the Chiefs won 38-35 — creates a scenario of tapping the same two fan bases in a short period of time. Generally, brokers are not fond of rematches that haven’t seen a significant amount of time elapse between games, unless it features teams with strong nationwide fan bases and broad popular commercial appeal across the NFL fan spectrum. The Chiefs and Eagles historically have featured neither.
  

• There’s a Chiefs hangover. Kansas City fans have seen their franchise in five of the past six Super Bowls, repeatedly drawing financially on the same fan base. This was often the lament of ticket brokers late in the New England Patriots' Super Bowl dynasty as general NFL fan bases tired of seeing the same team in the title game over and over, and the Patriots' fan base seemed to become less fervent about invading every Super Bowl. Even with the Chiefs going for a piece of history, some brokers theorize that the relatively young age of quarterback Patrick Mahomes has added to a general feeling of more Super Bowl opportunities on the table beyond this one. This was also a complaint during the Patriots' dynasty, until late in Tom Brady’s career, when brokers could sell the “last chance to see Brady in a Super Bowl” narrative.
  

• Escalated hotel costs have led to across-the-board issues with selling tickets — both in “experience” packages and individual ticket sales. Like many major cities hosting tentpole events, hotels across the country have seen significant inflation in their per-night prices, while also requiring more “multiple night” commitments during events. Some brokers believe that added cost has priced out some last-minute ticket buyers.

Will tickets prices continue to slide?

This is the gambit run by both fans and brokers during Super Bowl week, as some fans wait out brokers into Thursday night, trying to catch falling prices before ticket availability gets historically tighter late Friday and into Saturday. In the past four Super Bowls of ticketIQ data, the “get-in” prices of tickets was cheaper on the morning of Super Bowl Sunday than on the prior Wednesday. In theory, prices should continue to fall for this one if the trend of the past four years continues, with possible fluctuations up and down from Wednesday on.

An interesting question in this game is one that brokers have never faced: Could Trump’s attendance impact the game’s popularity in either direction?

A president has never attended the game before, so there’s no telling whether the historic moment will have an impact in either a positive or negative direction.

One thing is for certain: Brokers will be watching that data point closely — like every other measurable — trying to figure out what it could mean for next year’s game at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.