Tickets to the NFL season opener at the Kansas City home of the Chiefs, the reigning Super Bowl champions, have already topped $600 on average in the wake of the release of the 2024 football season schedule as the most expensive single-game ticket so far.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones waves to fans during the game against the New York Giants at AT&T ... [+]
The Baltimore Ravens at Kansas City Chiefs game on Sept. 5 was the most expensive game hours after tickets went on sale Wednesday night, according to online ticket marketplace Vivid Seats, with an average price of $603 per seat.
The Dallas Cowboys had two games among the top five most-expensive, in the No. 2 spot with the Sept. 8 game in Cleveland ($364 on average) and at No. 4 with the Nov. 3 game in Atlanta ($311).
The New York Jets v. San Francisco 49ers game, which could mark the return of Aaron Rodgers after he missed his first season in New York by tearing his ACL in the 2023 opening game, is the third most expensive match-up so far, with an average ticket price of $345.
The Buffalo Bills at Miami Dolphins game on Sept. 12 is in the No. 5 spot with an average price of $289, according to Vivid Seats.
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Single-game tickets for the NFL released on Wednesday night after the league put out its full season schedule live on national television. Season tickets and some multi-game packages were available ahead of time, but Wednesday marked the first day fans could buy individual seats with a date and time locked in. Ticket prices for football games have been steadily rising for decades and, alongside a surge in peer-to-peer online resale, have largely become inaccessible to the average fan—the average NFL ticket cost $377 last year, USA Today reported, up from $235 in 2022. Sporting event ticket prices rose more than twice as fast as overall consumer prices from 1999 to 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Teams “don’t care if families can’t afford the seats as long as they can still hook them watching TV,” Victor Matheson, a sports economist at College of the Holy Cross, told CNN.
Even though ticket sales rise on average almost every year (including the price of resale tickets), not every team raises prices at the source each season. For the 2024 season, about a dozen of 32 teams announced they would be raising ticket prices, including the Baltimore Ravens, Buffalo Bills, San Francisco 49ers, Washington Commanders and North Carolina Panthers, the worst team in the league. The Detroit Lions hiked prices the most this year, informing season ticket holders of a 30% increase on average with some tickets rising in cost by as much as 85%, according to Front Office Sports.
All but one of the teams that announced ticket price hikes this year have billionaire owners. The Green Bay Packers is a publicly owned, not-for-profit team.