What's The Best Place To Buy NFL Tickets For Each Team?

LAST UPDATED ON NOV. 18, 2024 AT 6:44 AM | 6 MINUTE READ

What’s the best place to buy NFL tickets?

For the purpose of saving money, you want a reseller that consistently offers the lowest prices.

Based on this criterion, the best NFL ticket site is TickPick.

But I digress…

Far be it from me to make an assertion without supporting evidence, but I’ll get to that later. 

First, let’s take a look at the…

Best NFL Ticket Sites?

Specifically, we’re going to examine toptenreview.com’s Best Sports Ticket Sites 2022, which represents a counterview of sorts. 

1. SeatGeek
2. StubHub
3. RazorGator
4. Vivid Seats
5. Ticket Master

To enumerate, their ranking method is based on:

• Transparency of prices & fees.  Nobody likes deception, so transparency is important. In regard to fees, the review goes on to say that “we favored websites with low resale fees”.  That’s great, but you can read here HOW SERVICE FEES DON’T REALLY MATTER.
• Return policies.  If this is one of their ranking points, why does the author go on to say that “Return policies are generally the same across all the websites”?  Hmmm…
• Buyer & seller guarantees.  Guarantee policies are also quite similar across sites.

I don’t think so!

I respectfully (and objectively) disagree.

To wit, their criteria are undistinguished to the point of being meaningless.  Indeed, it’s sort of like saying, “You should buy this car just because it gets good gas mileage.”

To clarify, let’s go over some of their reasons for ranking SeatGeek number one:

• Transparent fees. Many ticket resellers have adopted this policy, including 2 others on the list.
• “Shiny website and modern feel”. Again, they’re not alone in this, and their interface is quite similar to 2 other sites.
• “Great app”. Ditto the above.
• “Prices. “…were some of the lowest we found”. Um, where did they look? According to our research, SeatGeek’s prices were 2nd-best in their list, and by a wide margin.

By all means, I’m not dismissing their review as unauthoritative.  Rather, it’s more that it places too much weight on factors that I think aren’t that significant, and not enough on those that are.

That being said, let’s present our own list of…

The best place(s) to get NFL tickets

Based on the cheapest available, non-SRO tickets (min. 2), including fees. Games played overseas were excluded.

What the columns mean:

• Median Lowest Price. Based on the cheapest available listing among 11 sites from the 2023 season (267 games).
• Lowest Price Frequency. How often each site had the lowest ticket price for a game. What is Lowest Price Frequency?
• Weighted Avg. Price.(1 – lp) * mp. As an example, SeatGeek’s lp% is 4.12%. As a result…
  • 1 – .0412 = .9588
  • .9588 * $149.38 = $143.23
  • $143.23 + $149.38 = $292.61
• Transparency Score
  • 100 – the listed ticket price is the final price. $0 added to Weighted Avg. Price.
  • 80 – for sites which require you to click, “Show prices with estimated fees” in order to see your final price. $1 added.
  • 20 – Sites that don’t reveal the final cost until you go to the checkout page. $5 added.
• Site Score. Weighted Avg. Price + Transparency Score dollar value.

The cheapest NFL tickets, but…

Based on the evidence, TickPick is the best place to buy NFL tickets. It checks a lot, if not all, of the boxes:

• Cheapest NFL tickets
• Best Lowest Price Frequency
• 100% transparency

It’s important to realize that the first 2 bullet points encompass all games for all teams. Pointedly, however, the average NFL fan only gives a crap about her team, & a limited number of games at that.

Indeed, TickPick doesn’t have the lowest ticket price for every single game, nor the best price for every team. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

The best place to buy NFL tickets for each team

In order to streamline your bargain-hunting experience, we’ve put together two visualizations that will expedite your decision-making process.

First, we’ll show you each of the 10 ticket seller (median) prices for each team in a bar chart format, so you can see for yourself the differences in cost.

Secondly, we’ll reveal not only the ticket site that offers the best price for each team, but also the reseller with the lowest price frequency.

Instructions:

• The default view displays every NFL team. Mouse over the colored bars to see each ticket site’s corresponding price.
• Use the ‘Select Team’ dropdown box located at the bottom of the viz to show ticket prices for one team only.

Breaking down the visualization:

• Site 1 is the ticket site with the lowest median price for that team.
• Site 2 is the reseller with the best lowest price frequency for that team.
• In the Site 1 & Site 2 columns, the site name followed by ‘(2023)‘ means the reseller held the same distinction in 2023.
• Median Price is Site 2‘s median price for that team’s home games.
• Difference is the % difference in median price between Site 1 & the average of the other sites.
• Lowest Price % is the percentage of home games for which Site 2 had cheapest price.

Summary

• There are a number of factors in rating or ranking NFL ticket resellers.

• The importance of each factor is subjective; but in the author’s opinion it comes down to:
  • Price
  • How often a site has the cheapest price
  • Transparency

• The best place to buy NFL tickets is the site with the cheapest price for your team. While prices constantly change, its relationship within the secondary market usually remains the same. For example, let’s say a particular site is charging $100 for a ticket 2 months prior to the game, and that price is 5th-lowest. If that price rises to $150 a month later, chances are it will still be the 5th-lowest.

• Clearly, there is one ticket site that stands out, and that’s TickPick:
  • Not only is its median ticket price 14.3% cheaper than the rest,
  • It had the best (or tied for the best) price 81.7% of the time, more than double the frequency of any other site,
  • And of course, there are absolutely no extra fees.

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