Lack of Super Bowl tickets, high price locks out many Seahawks season-ticket holders

By Josh Kerns

The Super Bowl will arguably be the biggest game in Seahawks history. But many season-ticket holders who want to buy tickets have been shut out, while some of the lucky few say it’s too expensive to attend.

Matt Brown, a season-ticket holder since 1996, was one of a select few who got a coveted email from the Seahawks Sunday evening letting him know he was chosen in a lottery to buy up to four Super Bowl seats for the game in New Jersey. But each ticket alone is $800. And then there’s the travel.

“I went to Expedia and all those other sites and every time we hit refresh, the ticket prices for airfare were going up like $50 or $100 by the minute,” Brown says. “We added everything up and it would be about a $7,500 weekend is what we came up with for my wife and I to go.”

The Issaquah software developer says he and his wife talked for several hours Sunday night about whether it was worth it to just put all that on the credit card and pay it off over the course of the year.

Ultimately, between the cost and the fact the game is in New Jersey, rather than a warm weather destination like Miami or Arizona, they opted to watch from the comfort of their couch.

“Thirty-five degrees and snowing just doesn’t sound like fun to watch the game,” he laughs.

Plenty of other season-ticket holders, though, would gladly pay to take Brown’s tickets off his hands.

“I went from jubilation last night to frustration. It’s disheartening,” says David Kearns, a five-year season-ticket holder who wasn’t among the chosen few.

The Seahawks won’t comment on how many tickets they were given by the league, but it’s thought to be an extremely limited number. Season-ticket holders were told the team created a lottery with the number of entries based on the number of seats they have and the amount of years they’ve been season-ticket holders.

Kearns even bought plane tickets and booked a hotel months ago in hopes the Seahawks would make it to the Super Bowl. He says the league should give more tickets to the team first so the real fans can attend the game.

“I think unfortunately, corporations drive the market on this. I think it should be more like the bowl system, where the teams get thousands of tickets and then release them if they don’t all sell. You can’t tell me the Super Bowl still wouldn’t sell out.”

Kearns says he knows a number of season-ticket holders, none of whom were selected for the lottery either. And his company, which has eight seats, was also shut out.

Brown plans to sell his tickets to a friend who lives in New York, and feels bad for those like Kearns and the other season-ticket holders prevented from getting seats.

“And there’s no way I can make it good for them and make it good for me without going into the secondary market, which to me, there’s something kind of funny about that whole world.”

Funny isn’t the word most fans would use. The average ticket price on sites like StubHub is currently hovering around $4,000.

But Kearns says he’ll begrudgingly pay whatever it costs to get to the game.

“It’s only happened twice in my lifetime,” he says. “I have to be there.”