NFL fines 100 players for Super Bowl ticket scalping
While players and officials are allowed to sell tickets at face value, they are banned from doing so at inflated prices.
The face value price for Super Bowl tickets for the clash between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, which included a half-time performance by Kendrick Lamar, earlier this year, varied between $950 and $7,500 each.
However, the average resale price hit $10,417 on ticketing websites.
The minimum salary for a 'rookie' NFL player is understood to be around $750,000 a year.
But once established, their annual pay packet can hit $5m, with superstars – often quarterbacks – frequently earning twice as much.
Details of the clandestine transactions followed an investigation by the NFL.
'The investigation has revealed that club employees and players sold their tickets to a small number of 'bundlers' who were working with a ticket reseller to sell the Super Bowl tickets above face value,' Sabrina Perel, the head of compliance at the NFL, wrote in a memo.
Players who touted tickets will be fined one and a half times the face value of the ticket and banned from buying any for the 2026 Super Bowl, unless their team is competing.
Officials will be fined double the face value of the tickets.
However, the move merely scratches the surface of a flourishing industry in reselling tickets to major sporting and entertainment events.
Resell market worth $3.4bn
According to industry estimates, the resale market, which is legal in the US, was worth $3.4bn last year.
The practice is controversial with some companies using 'bots' – computerised programmes – to hoover up thousands of tickets at a time as soon as they go on sale, before putting them back on the market at vastly inflated prices.
To the fury of President Donald Trump, previous attempts to curb the use of bots have failed, leaving fans having to pay as much as 70 times the face value of a ticket.
In March, Mr Trump signed an executive order to protect fans from ticket touting and crack down on what he described as 'unscrupulous middle-men who impose egregious fees on fans with no benefit to artists'.
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