superbowl111The good news: If you want to go to the Super Bowl, there are still tickets available. The bad news: Ticket costs are reaching insane levels.

As of early Thursday, the cheapest ticket on NFL’s official ticket exchange was $9,751. On StubHub, the cheapest ticket was $8,070.

Other re-sale sites had similar offers. FanXchange had some in the $7,000 range; SeatGeek’s cheapest ticket was $6,560; PrimeSport — a licensed NFL broker — had minimum tickets at around $8,500.

If the prices seem ridiculously high, well, they are. TiqIQ, an online ticket marketplace based in New York, notes that the average ticket price right now is 192 percent higher than this time last year.

There are also very few tickets available. For example, only 214 are left on StubHub, and just 99 on the NFL Ticket Marketplace. Yahoo Sports noted that the lack of inventory is causing uneasiness for brokers, who hope that ticket prices fall by Sunday — if history repeats itself, they should drop. Yahoo also reported that ticket prices are currently at 5X from face value.

Charles Robinson at Yahoo Sports explained how some brokers are blaming the NFL for the ticket price increases. From his piece:

The lack of inventory has left some brokers scratching their heads and pointing fingers. One said he believes the NFL privately instructed teams to delay the release of tickets to coaches, players and corporate sponsors until as late as Friday. The goal? He believes it is to financially squeeze ticket brokers who mark up the NFL’s product to the tune of millions of dollars, money that the league wants to keep by funneling tickets through its own broker partnerships like PrimeSport.com. In turn, restricting the tickets available also drives the prices up significantly by starving the market.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, Super Bowl tickets have gone up dramatically in the last decade, and certainly since the first Super Bowl in 1967 when you could enjoy the big game in person for just $6.

Of course, if you’re going to the game, you’ll need to buy airline and hotel tickets, too. The cheapest round-trip ticket that gets you to Phoenix on Saturday and back to Seattle on Monday is $524 on Kayak. You’ll need to shell out at least $200 for a hotel, too.

Or, if money isn’t a problem, this “Volcano Oasis” listing in Peoria, Ariz., runs at $25,000 per night during Super Bowl weekend.

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