I know! Let me tell you, the best time to live in New York was between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Not a tourist to be seen!
I don’t even like football, and I think it’s awesome that they’re playing a traditionally fall/winter sport in a place that actually experiences fall/winter weather. I understand the economics that you cite driving the decision to keep it in warm weather locations, but it makes the whole thing seem like a farce–all crass commercialism, with nothing about the sport.
I’ve spent time in New York in winter and in summer, and I love visiting when it’s cold and snowy. Walking around the city in a big coat, with snow coming down, is great, and you can duck into a nice warm place for a hot chocolate or something stronger. Far better, IMO, than sweltering through an August visit.
I rarely watch football, and when I do it’s almost always as a backdrop to doing something else (I’m a baseball guy, never had much interest in the other Big 4 sports).
But if it’s snowy on Sunday, or even just bitter cold, i am most definitely going to watch.
If the tickets have all been sold, and specifically sold to people who will put their (or their family’s or friends’) butts in the seats if they aren’t able to resell them, then you’ve got a sellout. But if you’ve got 18,000 tickets in the hands of 500 ticket resellers who are apparently hoping to get more money for those seats than people are willing to pay, then you’ve got something that may technically be a sellout, but may look very unlike one on game day.
My suspicion is that if the price of tix drops low enough,most of those brokers will eat the loss entirely rather than get a small fraction of it back by setting a precedent of selling them for cheap at the last minute. And by ‘low enough,’ I’m thinking somewhere between $100 and $200 per.
See, I’d go see it in person despite the cold or snow if it were cheap enough. Which it won’t be. (Cheap to me means about twenty bucks. I know that’s not going to happen.)
Your “precedent” argument is silly. Ticket brokers and scalpers price their tickets based on their perception of market value, and most of them are savvy enough to recognize that they might, on some events, have trouble offloading the tickets for more than face value. Most of the time, especially on an event like the Superbowl, they can make a good profit.
They’re not going to refuse to sell the tickets just out of spite, or some misguided concern about precedent, because they also recognize that the weather in New York this year is incredibly unlikely to affect demand for Superbowl tickets in Arizona next year, or in California the year after that.
Superbowl tickets, like most event tickets, have a specific and limited shelf life. They’re not like televisions or cars or collectibles, which you can hold onto when the market is weak in the hope that prices pick up. Why would you hold onto 5 Superbowl tickets, rather than take $200 each for them? Why choose $0 over $1000, when the money you paid for the tickets is a sunk cost that you have no other may of getting back?
Uh, ticket brokers set that precedent the first time they ever had an extra ticket at kickoff. Outside of a blizzard, there is no conceivable way every seat in the stadium won’t be filled. The ticket brokers will still be able to feed their families the next day as well.
He’s right. I’ve seen ticket scalpers for rock concerts rip up tickets rather then sell them at too low a price once the show starts. They don’t want people to think that they can just wait and get them cheap.
How long ago was that? The vast majority of third party sales these days is via StubHub and other online vendors. The guys out on the corner are a tiny, tiny fraction of that market - especially for a game like the Super Bowl. And with how geographically isolated MetLife is, anyone selling in the parking lot is going to take what they can get - especially since the people wanting to buy that are out there are already somewhat committed.
Anyway, there’s zero way anyone’s going to prove any of these claims. “Technically” the Super Bowl sold out minutes after the tickets went on sale, just like every Super Bowl for probably the last 30 years. The OP’s source was either faulty, badly written/researched, or non-existent.
I was at the BCS National Championship game last year, and I don’t remember seeing very many scalpers at all. There’s just too much fear of counterfeit tickets for those games. Going through StubHub, you have a guarantee (via both StubHub as well as your credit card fraud protection) that you’re getting what you’re paying for. And the sellers are benefiting by having access to a huge population of potential buyers - at least far more than they’d ever see on that corner.
The event that is different is March Madness, where people may have tickets to a particular round but won’t know if their team is in it until the last minute. Lots of tickets flood the market - often by street scalpers - right before game time when fans lose interest because their team has been eliminated.
There isn’t one. I suppose you could say that the last two Super Bowls, both of which were played indoors, had higher viewership totals than any other since the eighties, but that ignores the fact that there’s been a rising trend in viewership since 2000. Otherwise, in the last fifteen or so years, you couldn’t pick the indoor games from the outdoor games by looking at viewership totals.
Now, if viewership dips this year there might be an argument.
