In 2024 the average cost of a sports ticket went up by 83 percent compared to 2023 why is that? The answer is more complicated than most people think, let’s go over a magnitude of different reasons.

Let’s start with inflation and how that has impacted the price of sports tickets. Inflation has made a negative impact on fans’ wallets by making the dollar less valuable, it makes the price of tickets rise as we saw in 2024.

Another major reason ticket prices have increased is that teams must constantly repair the arena they play in. That can add up a lot over time and event staff can also be a huge spend for most teams on top of the three biggest expenses, another major expense is player contracts the teams have to have a roster to play the sport, and the average roster only increases in cost. But those are just some of the major expenses. Other costs include having to pay for parking rental spaces which can get expensive for teams depending on the surrounding area, merchandise costs can cost up to 8 dollars per jersey, and food costs they need to pay to get the food to the arena and the fact that an average arena spends about 1.5 million dollars on food for fans alone.

But a lesser talked about reason that it is important is the group or person that owns the teams, after all, they have a pretty large say in a lot of things including ticket prices. In my opinion, tickets are so expensive because the teams have no choice if they made them cheaper then they would lose a lot of money maybe leading them to go bankrupt and be forced to disband the team, and no fan wants that so the reality is tough for a lot of people, but teams don’t have an option, especially in the economy today.