COVID-19 has put a huge stress on Jim Holzman’s Boston-based ticket business. For the first time since he started Ace Ticket in 1979, he had nothing to sell. Millions of dollars in projected revenue went down the drain.
“I told my wife, ‘I just have to hold on until May when the NFL schedule comes out,’” Holzman said from his office Thursday morning.
And boy did it deliver.
The months of famine all of a sudden turned into a feast when Holzman saw this line on Week 4 in the Patriots schedule:
Tampa Bay Buccaneers @ New England Patriots SNF, 8:30 PM ET
“For so long, I’ve just been waiting to sell something and now we have something so big, I haven’t really slept since it became official last night. In fact, I’ll probably have to go to the hospital soon since I’ve had an erection for more than six hours!”
In Holzman’s 42 years in the business, he’s never seen a regular season ticket selling for as much as Tom Brady’s return to Foxboro is costing. For the return of Brady and Rob Gronkowski, Holzman has set every ticket on the company’s website as ending in “12” or “87,” their jersey numbers.
As of 10 a.m. ET, the cheapest ticket on Holzman’s site is $1,287, a nosebleed seat parallel to one of the end zones. The most expensive? $7,912 a seat, which buys you Row 1 on the 50.
“I mean, it’s pretty much Super Bowl prices,” Holzman said. “But it makes sense. We never got to say goodbye.”
Ticketing website TickPick says the average purchase price for that game on the site so far is $2,740 a ticket. To put that in perspective, the highest average purchase price TickPick has on record for a regular season Patriots game is from 2017 against the Chiefs, which had an average sale price of $689. TickPick's biggest sale? A customer purchased five tickets for $15,405.
Holzman was looking at his website and phones lighting up on Thursday, shaking his head in disbelief.
“It’s not even a matter of price,” Holzman said. “I’m gonna run out of tickets. I mean, how could it get any bigger?”
Well, there’s one more reason.
As noted by stat guru Warren Sharp, Brady is 1,154 passing yards short of the all-time record owned by Drew Brees. If he averages what he averaged per game in 2020 (289.6), he’ll break the record in….Week 4.
Brady, of course, won six Super Bowls in his nearly two decades with the Patriots before leaving for Tampa Bay and winning the Super Bowl there. And they still feel positive about Brady even though he left, in large part because it was the Patriots, as much as Brady, who decided it was time to move on.
Brady went on to win the Super Bowl last year and the Patriots went 7-9 and missed the playoffs, ending an 11-year streak.
While the ticket is the highest ticket price ever for a regular season NFL game, it's not the highest priced regular season ticket in any sport. In February 2019, Zion Williamson and No. 1 Duke took at No. 8 North Carolina at Cameron Indoor. The get-in price was more than $2,000. The game didn't live up to its billing after 33 seconds in Zion Williamson famously blew out his shoe.
