Tickets still available for Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor, average price trails Pacquiao bout
Saturday’s superfight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor is going to shatter all kinds of records, but when it comes to ticket demand, it’s looking like it will fall short of first place.
As of Thursday, there were still over 1,500 tickets remaining on StubHub for seats at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nev., a somewhat surprising number given the personalities involved and the fact that there has never been an MMA vs. boxing matchup of this magnitude.
In comparison, Mayweather’s 2015 encounter with Manny Pacquiao — the fight that Mayweather vs. McGregor is most often measured against — had sold out all of its seats at face value a week before fight night, as TicketIQ’s Jesse Lawrence pointed out in an article for CNBC. Lawrence also notes that part of the reason that ticket sales may be lagging is due to viewers having cheaper alternatives to simulate the live experience, such as spending as low as $60 to attend a closed circuit screening of the fight.
The most expensive ticket still available on StubHub is $80,200 for ringside seats as of this writing. On Aug. 18, ESPN’s Darren Rovell tweeted that the most expensive ticket sold through StubHub to date was $55,830 for a pair of third row floor seats.
Data provided by online ticket marketplace Vivid Seats paints a similar picture. In recent weeks, the average ticket price (ATP) for Mayweather vs. McGregor has hovered around 5-8% lower than Mayweather vs. Pacquiao, which closed with an average sold ticket price of $3,859. The cheapest ticket for that fight on the secondary market fell in the $4,000 range, while the low price for a Mayweather vs. McGregor ticket is around $1,200 on the Vivid Seats site as of Thursday, down from $1,702 on Aug. 8.
Going by StubHub numbers, the discrepancy in average ticket price is even larger, with Mayweather vs. McGregor’s $3,521 coming in well behind an ATP of $4,456 for Mayweather vs. Pacquaio, according to Kevin Skiver of CBSSports.com. That figure is still well ahead of the third-place fight on the list, Mayweather’s 2013 meeting with Canelo Alvarez ($2,109 ATP) and McGregor’s most successful UFC fight against Eddie Alvarez last November ($1,207 ATP).
For a broader comparison, the most recent Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons had an average sold ticket price of $5,015 (per Vivid Seats).
Obviously, none of these numbers in any way indicate that Mayweather vs. McGregor will be anything less than an absurd financial success for all parties involved once pay-per-view numbers and countless other sources of revenue are taken into account; if anything, this merely shows that as audiences are given more avenues through which to watch and experience major events, ticket vendors will have to adjust their strategies accordingly no matter how much hype is generated in pursuit of the elusive sell out.
