Sports

How to get Super Bowl 53 tickets? Try these tips - and be ready to spend

ATLANTA, GA - AUGUST 15: A general view inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium, host to Super Bowl LIII. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

ATLANTA, Ga. — The next Super Bowl will be played in Atlanta, raising a natural question for many local football fans: Will tickets be available?

Tickets won’t be available in the traditional sense of an open-to-the-general-public sale at face value. The NFL doesn’t do that with Super Bowl tickets.

Tickets will be available at face value to a relatively small number of holders of high-end Falcons season-tickets. Buyers of $45,000 personal seat licenses for the roughly 1,300 club seats around the 50-yard line are guaranteed the right to buy Super Bowl tickets.

For most other folks, the best shot at buying tickets for Super Bowl LIII, to be played Feb. 3, 2019, in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, may be as part of hospitality packages or on the secondary market. Hospitality packages bundle game tickets with access to other events, such as pregame parties, and amenities; the cost generally is considerably higher than the face value of game tickets alone.

RELATED STORIES:

The NFL controls Super Bowl tickets and has divvied up the inventory this way in recent seasons: 17.5 percent to each of the participating teams, 5 percent to the host team, 1.2 percent to each of the other 29 teams and 25.2 percent to the league office.

Some tickets eventually find their way to the secondary market, of course. About 48 hours before Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis, StubHub said the average re-sale price on its site for tickets to the game was $5,414 and the lowest was $3,103.