Tickets for Williams-Brice soccer showdown: overpriced or simply a sign of demand?
The sticker shock was real on Monday morning.
As folks tried to buy tickets to the Manchester United vs. Liverpool friendly soccer match at Williams-Brice Stadium on Aug. 3, some were struck by the asking prices.
“Tickets are extortion,” wrote one fan on X (formerly Twitter). “You can fly to the UK for the price of two tickets and see them play.”
“The tix were way over priced for a friendly game! Four tix for top of the nose bleed section would have cost me over $900! Ridiculous!” another person said.
“These games have to stop being rip-offs for the fans,” someone else added.
At the beginning of Monday’s “pre-sale” for the event, a general upper-level seat was starting in the $70 range before fees and increased in price for lower rows. Some lower-level tickets with a mid-field vantage point were selling for over $500 with the first few rows selling for over $800.
And the costs per ticket increased as the sales process went on, known as “dynamic pricing” in the ticket industry — a reflection of shrinking supply vs. steady or surging demand. A ticket that sold for $100 when the sale began at 9 a.m. increased on Ticketmaster to over $150 at 10 a.m.
Regardless, the demand was there. The match sold out over 70,000 seats just three hours into the general sale that began Tuesday morning.
That has since caused a spike in prices on the secondary ticket market that Columbia-based events don’t often see.
About soccer ticket prices
On Wednesday, just over 24 hours after the general sale ended, the cheapest upper-level resale tickets on Ticketmaster for the the Manchester United/Liverpool match at Williams-Brice were being listed for over $200 (before taxes and fees). By Thursday morning, after more tickets went onto the resale market, the cheapest ticket prices had dropped to below $160 before fees.
The lower-level seats near midfield, which were being sold at face value for $300 to $500 depending on the row, are going anywhere from under $500 to about $800. Then there are a few listings being made by folks who are clearly shooting for the stars.
Someone is selling two tickets in section 21, row A6 for $2,000 each, which is quite the reach when you notice another seller is listing tickets two rows back for $667 each.
And it’s not just a few people putting their tickets up for sale. On StubHub alone, there are nearly 1,200 listings that equate to over 1,500 tickets.
As time goes on, the demand will dictate the market. Perhaps interest will be just as high come summertime. Or, perhaps, the initial awe will wane and the secondary market ticket prices will come down.
As a comparison, a South Carolina football game’s face value for tickets might range for $40 for a smaller-school opponent to $100 or $125 for a home game against Clemson or a top SEC foe. On the secondary market, most USC-Clemson seats in 2023 asked between $200 and $300 closer to gameday, according to WLTX, with club seats ranging from $400 to $1,500.
Williams-Brice Stadium has hosted big-name concerts before: Kenny Chesney (2008 and 2013), and Beyonce and Jay-Z in 2018. While those events produced strong ticket sales, the initial demand did not match what happened with the Manchester United vs. Liverpool soccer showdown.
The secondary ticket market works like any other capitalistic system. Take hotels for example. A room at the Hilton in Columbia might cost $125 when vacancy is high. But if a convention comes to town and rooms start booking up in a hurry, the hotel will raise their prices. They understand there’s more supply than demand and want to maximize their profits.
The secondary ticket market — most common on sites like Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, Gametime, etc. — is the same way. Ticket resellers, which might include savvy brokers or your average fan, will buy a lot of tickets during the sale for the original face-value charge, then throw them on the resale websites at at an inflated price.
If tickets start selling, they’ll raise the prices even more, trying to see how much someone will spend. If the demand isn’t there, they’ll have no choice but to lower the prices.
In any case, Williams-Brice Stadium should be completely full come Aug. 3.
