The Most Someone Has Paid For A Super Bowl Ticket
Whenever the Super Bowl rolls around, a couple of massive transactions will almost inevitably take place. People viewing the event at home will buy gigantic televisions with every intention of returning them after the big game, which CBS describes as "a form of retail fraud" that affected roughly 33% of companies surveyed in 2018. Alternatively, fans who are dead-set on watching the game in person will cough up the cost of a car or even a house just to get their hands on a Super Bowl ticket.
Things weren't always that way. How Stuff Works observes that tickets to history's first Super Bowl in 1967 cost a wallet-friendly $10, which is currently worth about $76 bucks in 2020 money, according to the DollarTimes conversion tool. Since then, the NFL has become a commercial juggernaut, and not just because of the awesome commercials that air during the Super Bowl. Not even the dirtiest players can hold a candle to the league's filthy richness.
Unsurprisingly, the priciest tickets are too rich for most people's blood. But who has hemorrhaged the most money for a ticket to the Super Bowl?
A hundred grand to stand
Yahoo Finance reports that for the 2019 Super Bowl, the cheapest seats available from the largest verified market, SeatGeek, carried a fairly gargantuan price tag of $2,885. The most expensive seats reached $227,489.99 for a pair, or about $113,745 per seat. For that amount of dough, you might think a spectator gets to sit in a La-Z-Boy placed on the sideline of their preferred team, but no, that's still an upper deck seat. Yet even that upper decker doesn't sound nearly as crappy as what hundreds of Dallas Cowboys fans endured during Super Bowl XLV.
Held at Cowboys Stadium (which has since been renamed as AT&T Stadium) in 2011, Super Bowl XLV was more of a toilet bowl for hundreds of people who shelled out big bucks for a seat they never got. As recounted by CBS, a whopping 1,250 standby seats were deemed unsafe, forcing more than 800 to sit elsewhere and the remaining 400 or so ticket holders "to watch from standing-room locations around the stadium." A select group of spectators dubbed "Founders" spent an absurd "$100,000 per seat just for the right to buy tickets." Though not technically the highest price, it's an obscenely steep fee to pay for a seat you never received. Understandably furious, they sued the NFL, the Cowboys, and team owner Jerry Jones for dropping the ball.