Guaranteed Seats at Super Bowl XLI

[sportscurmudgeon]

Dana87:

They don't need a lot of seats to cover demand. Assume they have 10 seats and no more. If they assure that there are never more than 5 options sold on every team, then they have all the tickets they can possibly need to cover all the options sold - - five for the AFC team and five for the NFC team. All the options sold on all the other 30 teams are null and void.

If you are in the ticket brokering business - I'm not but I know someone who is and who makes a tidy sum from it - getting hold of a few dozen tickets to big events is not all that hard. Now getting a few hundred tickets is hard, but not 30-50. And he's been in the biz for about 10 years now.

Is this a scam? It could very well be. But so could an auction on e-bay be a scam when you bid for tickets and send along your check and you get counterfeit ones in return. You can also get scammed by scalpers outside the stadium. It will be interesting to see if this place stays around after March Madness - - where they also have options for sale...


That Guy:

Assuming this site is on the up-and-up, I doubt that the NFL has much legal recourse. They are selling the ticket at face value to the option-holder. That is the only thing that the league can enforce once they sell the ticket to whomever provided them to the site at face value. Consider this example:

I buy two tix to the super Bowl from the NFL at face value. I give my local church those two tix to the Super Bowl and they have a raffle for the tickets with each ticket costing $10. The church takes in $10K in raffle ticket sales draws a number and gives away the pair of tix. Do you really think the NFL would have a ghost of a chance suing me as the donor or the church as the "scalper" here? I don't.

Now if the person who originally bought the tix sold them to the site at more than face value, then the league MIGHT have a recourse against that original buyer. But they won't know who that is until game time and they go to the trouble of identifying who is seated in every seat and matching that ID to the person who nominally bouught the tix in the first place. That's an awful lot of work and I doubt they would try to do it.