Super Bowl tickets are cheaper than usual. A Temple professor explains why.

Super Bowl tickets are crazy expensive, so far out of most fans’ budgets that they don’t even consider going to the game.

This week, the cheapest ticket on the secondary market was about $3,500 after fees. So far, StubHub customers have paid about $7,200 on average to get into the Eagles-Chiefs game, according to data from the company.

But relative to other recent Super Bowls, these prices are a steal. Albeit a steal that will likely cost you several times your mortgage payment.

“We’re seeing a dip this year,” said Rick Ridall, the executive director of industry and alumni relations for Temple University’s School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management.

For a single seat at last year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas, tickets on secondary-market sites started at around $9,000 with some going for more than $12,000.

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Ridall, also a professor of instruction at Temple, previously worked in ticketing for the Eagles and Comcast Spectacor. He broke down the many factors that go into pricing — and opined on whether the cost could drop even more as the big game approaches.

Ticket prices come down to supply and demand, of course, Ridall said, plus a myriad other factors, including location and the teams that are playing.

This year, prices may be lower because New Orleans has hosted the Super Bowl several times before, he said.

“This is the 11th time New Orleans has hosted the Super Bowl,” Ridall said. So local residents and wealthy travelers who just want to go to the big game have had a chance to do that already.

And for at least one of the involved fan bases, it’s hard to argue that seeing your team win a Super Bowl in-person is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: The Chiefs have won the last two Super Bowls and played in three of the last four.

“Their fan base is like, ‘been there, done that,’” Ridall said. “This is the cheapest the tickets have been since the Super Bowl was in Atlanta in 2019, and that was the last year of the Patriots’ Super Bowl dynasty.” At the time, New England had played in four of the last five.

The Eagles have been in two of the past seven Super Bowls, and won their first title in 2018.

The New Years attack in New Orleans and the rare winter storm that struck the region last month may also have contributed to lower demand, Ridall said.

While ticket prices usually drop ahead of a concert or regular-season sporting event, Super Bowl tickets actually tend to increase in price as the game approaches, Ridall said.

Prices typically spike after the NFC and AFC championship games, which determine which teams will play in the Super Bowl; moderate during the two-week break before the Super Bowl; and then spike again in the days before the game.

But so far this year, they have kept going down.

“I think by the time we get to the game we could see a get-in price of $1,500 or $2,000, which would be significantly lower,” Ridall said. And prices reliably drop even more after kickoff, at the same time that ticketless fans in the parking lots are having their final internal debates about whether to splurge on the experience.

“I’m confident we’ll see those seats filled one way or the other,” Ridall said. “Traditionally, we’ve seen that impulse buy at the end, that fear of missing out.”

People who attended the past five Super Bowls paid the following amounts on average, according to USA Today, citing SeatGeek data:

Ticket prices for this year’s Super Bowl are on par, not accounting for inflation, with admission to the 2018 Super Bowl that the Eagles won.

About a third of the stadium will be non-VIPs, Ridall said. That’s about 26,000 people.

The NFL controls the ticketing, Ridall said, giving the Eagles and Chiefs each 17.5% of tickets, 5% to the host team, and 1.5% of tickets to each of the other teams in the league. They keep other tickets to sell to corporate sponsors.

Eagles season ticket holders were able to enter a lottery for Super Bowl tickets. Other fans without team or NFL connections were left to peruse the secondary-market sites.

While it’s a feat to get tickets — and nearly impossible at face value, which starts around $950 — Ridall said he’s confident plenty of Eagles fans will be at the game Sunday.

On StubHub as of Thursday, customers from Pennsylvania had bought about 15% of all Super Bowl tickets sold, according to a spokesperson, while folks in Kansas and Missouri have bought 8%.

“We’ll see a lot of green in that stadium,” Ridall said.