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The NFL’s secondary ticket market is a very profitable business, but when folks are simply scalping tickets, well, the NFL and its teams don’t love that. And they definitely don’t love it when players and club employees do it for a Super Bowl.
But that is apparently what happened at Super Bowl LIX, played on Feb. 9 at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
NFL Is Fining Players And Coaches
And the league, which frowns on this, caught the scalpers.
The NFL can track the tickets to its games and has the digital capability to confirm if the people who purchased a Super Bowl ticket actually used it.
So the NFL is fining approximately 100 players – 100! – and two dozen club employees for violating league policy of selling Super Bowl LIX tickets above face value, a league source told OutKick on Friday. The story was first reported by the Associated Press.
The NFL isn’t done. There is an ongoing investigation into the matter.
NFL Fines For Scalping Will Vary
The actual amount of the fines will vary. Players who resold their tickets will have to pay 150 percent of the face value of the ticket they originally bought. Those players will also forfeit their privilege of buying tickets to future Super Bowls unless they’re actually playing in the game.
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Club employees who were caught scalping will be fined 200 percent of the face value of the tickets they purchased.
No names of the players or other employees already caught are known. What is known is that coaches were involved as well as players.
The players and coaches apparently sold their tickets to so-called “bundlers” who were working on behalf of a ticket reseller, who then marked up the price of the tickets a second time.
Super Bowl Tickets Are Not Cheap
This isn’t the first time this has happened, although the scale this year is quite something.
Former Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Tice admitted to scalping part of his allotment of Super Bowl tickets in 2005. Tice was eventually fined $100,000 by the NFL.
Super Bowl LIX tickets were averaging around $4,708 on the secondary market the week of the game, according to various reports. The cheapest tickets started around $2,668 on TickPick, while the most expensive seats, particularly those close to the field and sidelines, exceeded $10,000.
Some seating for the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles climbed to prices as high as $50,000.
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