And they’re selling them at a loss
When the Minnesota Vikings take on the Detroit Lions in the final game of the 2024 NFL regular season on Sunday Night Football, they’ll have at least a little bit of support in the crowd at Ford Field, thanks to the team’s owners.
According to Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated, the Vikings did something rather unusual and purchased around 1,900 tickets to Sunday’s game on the secondary market, with the majority of them centered behind the visiting bench at Ford Field. They then turned around and offered the tickets at a much lower price to season ticket holders on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Some of the tickets were being sold for as little as $200. That’s not cheap, but I can promise you it’s a whole lot less than what they were going for otherwise.
Overall, the purchase cost the Wilf family around $2 million. Again, that’s a lot to folks like us, but to the Wilfs it’s more or less a drop in the bucket. The Lions, as you’d expect, whined about the purchase to the league, only to be informed that the Vikings hadn’t violated any rules.
As Breer’s story points out, even though the e-mail that the Vikings sent to season ticket holders said that the tickets weren’t “positioned for resale,” a few folks have done just that with the tickets anyway. Still, I’d be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of folks who bought the tickets through the Vikings will be making their way to Detroit to see what’s being called the biggest regular season game in NFL history on Sunday night.
