Super Bowl Prices Down 40% In Secondary Market, Biggest Drop Since 2009

The Super Bowl is only days away, but ticket brokers are having a difficult time cashing in on the Big Game. Two weeks ago, the average ticket sold was somewhere between $2,400 and $2,500 on TicketClub.com. As of now the prices are down to $1,500 -- a decline of roughly 40 percent. "I would say that this is probably the biggest decline since the Super Bowl of 2009 (after the financial crisis)," Don Vaccaro, CEO of Ticket Club, told Benzinga. "And then 2010 was bad as well. But this year the price has started at a much higher [rate]." Vaccaro said that price drop has also impacted the number of tickets being sold. "There's a lot of volume being sold with these price drops," he said. "Usually you can get spikes up and down right before the Super Bowl, and the only reason you get those spikes the day before is [because] it's traded so thinly -- there's very few orders left for the Super Bowl and very few tickets left for the Super Bowl."

Ticket Club (which is owned by TicketNetwork.com) is open to the public but was designed for ticket brokers. Though a membership is not required, the $49.99 annual fee eliminates all service charges.

Vaccaro said that this Super Bowl is a unique situation because it is less of a destination for New York folks. The price is also a factor -- consumers will pay no less than $800 for the cheapest ticket, and that's only if they are lucky enough to buy one at face value. "I think the pre-game and the excitement of going to New York is very exciting for the fans," said Vaccaro. "The pre-game parties are big this year. There's lots of things to do in New York. But I don't think that many companies purchased a lot [of tickets] in advance and targeted this year's Super Bowl for an event because they thought the price would be too exorbitant. So without those corporate buyers in the market, the price definitely dropped." Worse yet, some fans simply prefer to stay at home. "There's also a lot of folks who just don't want to leave Manhattan, go to the Meadowlands, take a bus to the Super Bowl and sit out in the freezing cold when they could watch it on TV," Vaccaro explained.

"There's a regular recurring theme with three of the four big leagues, with NHL being aside. The fans are getting such a good experience on the big screen, high-definition TVs that they're worrying it's going to hurt live attendance. Why bother going to the game -- go through the hassle, spend the money -- when you can see it probably much better on a large screen TV?"

Most consumers don't want to spend several hundred (or several thousand) dollars to watch a football game in 30-degree weather. "[But] if all of a sudden we had a breezy, sunny day on Sunday for the Super Bowl, you could see -- over the period of two days -- a 30 to 40 percent increase in the price of the tickets," said Vaccaro. "It doesn't look like the weather is going to clear up, that it's going to be warm, but ticket prices [could rise] because of the weather." Disclosure: