Top five ticket fiascos in sports history: 2025 Masters joins the list
With ANGC cracking down on badges sold on the secondary market, some badges were confiscated on the grounds, and others never made their way into the hands of ticket brokers.
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That got us thinking: Where did this fall in the history of sports ticket fiascos?
All of five of these incidents occurred in the past 15 years, most due to the maturing of the online ticketing industry and the ability of brokers to list and sell the tickets they didn't yet have in hand.
1. Super Bowl XLIX, 2015
The ultimate short squeeze happened 10 years ago in Phoenix for the Seahawks-Patriots Super Bowl, when brokers couldn't backfill the orders at the prices they needed to make a profit.
The result? Hundreds of fans who thought they had already secured tickets wound up sitting at local bars watching the game.
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Brokers sold the tickets on local sites in the $2,000 range, but as the game approached, the worst seats has soared in price to around $5,000. The choice for some brokers was to save your company at a loss or go out of business. Some chose the latter.
It could have been much worse. Any ticket purchased through StubHub was guaranteed. The resale site found replacement tickets, even if it meant eating their profits.
2. BCS Championship Game, 2011
Phoenix was also the host to the National Championship game between Auburn and Oregon in 2011. The same short squeeze happened to sellers.
After a massive ticket broker told StubHub he was going to default, StubHub — having that guarantee — pulled the event off the market. StubHub offered anyone who had tickets in hand to pay them double, but, after StubHub halted the market, prices went up four times.
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A 50-yard line seat went from $4,000 to $16,000.
3. Masters, 2025
Technically, Masters badges can't be sold, but with no real public resale, thousands of them are. For so long, Augusta National has turned a blind eye. But that changed in 2025 as ANGC stepped up its enforcement.
With badges disappearing, the $450 badge, which was selling for $3,000 per day, all of a sudden went to an unheard-of $15,000 a day.
It's hard to gauge exactly how many badges were taken away, but an estimate from a source close to the ground told cllct it was in the hundreds.
Why is that so detrimental? Because resellers sell the badge every day to a different person, meaning if a badge is taken away, the revenue is lost on anything going forward.
4. Super Bowl XLV, 2011
Just weeks after the BCS Championship game, the Super Bowl in Dallas resulted in an unprecedent fiasco. This had nothing to do with short sellers.
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Mere hours before the game between the Packers and Steelers, the NFL said that 1,250 temporary seats that were installed were not safe, and 400 of the fans who had seats in that area were moved to standing-room-only spaces around the stadium.
The NFL said fans in those areas would get a face value refund (likely not close to what they paid) or a free ticket to a future Super Bowl of their choice. We assume some are still waiting, as neither team has been back to the championship game since then.
5. Masters, 1997
Prices quickly soared to then-record levels as Tiger Woods ran away from the field to win his first Masters.
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Nike's Phil Knight was offering $10,000 for badges, setting a high-water mark for a sports ticket at the time, and putting a squeeze on brokers who were unable to fulfill their commitments.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.
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