Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor is going to be a big fight, and with it will come big price tags for those who want to watch the fight on pay-per-view or live. While the details on pricing haven’t been announced yet, fans are already expecting to pay around $100 to watch the event at home. That’s on par with the $99.95 Mayweather vs. Pacquiao cost us, and all signs point to similar pricing.
“When you talk about superfights, this is a superfight,” UFC president Dana White said when announcing the fight. “Two different guys from two different sports going in and putting it on the line? You can’t charge what you normally charge for a pay-per-view. And saying there was push back on the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao superfight price? There was anything but, it was the biggest fight ever in the history of pay-per-view.”
If you think a hundred bucks is a lot for this fight, don’t even think about trying to see the fight live. The event will be held at the 20,000 seat T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, and every single ticket will be rare and extremely expensive. That’s partially just the nature of such a massive event, but it’s also because of the unusual method of ticket distribution that goes down for a fight like this. The best comparison we have is, once again, Mayweather vs. Pacquiao.
Typically, an event is announced and the promoter releases the majority of the seats to the public through whatever ticketing company they choose. For Mayweather vs. Pacquiao, a huge fight broke out between the various promoters on how many tickets each party got, resulting in a complete mess and only 500 tickets being sold directly to the public at a face value of $1500. As for the rest, 40% went to the MGM Grand, 30% to Mayweather Promotions, and 30% to Pacquiao’s promoter Top Rank … two weeks before the fight.
If you're wondering how much a 🎟 to see #MayweatherMcgregor is gonna cost you, this is for a decent seat for #MayPac pic.twitter.com/NtbMzuMOdN
— E. Casey Leydon (@ekc) June 15, 2017
They were free to try and make however much they could off them in that limited time frame, and they managed to get a lot. Mayweather vs. Pacquiao shattered records with a $72 million gate on 16,219 tickets sold. According to a detailed breakdown from TickPick’s Brett Goldberg, those with connections to the MGM, Mayweather, and Top Rank paid an average of $5215 per ticket all the way up to $11,150 for ringside seats. That’s a steal compared to prices on the ticket resale markets, where $11,150 barely gets you in the building. Roughly 2500 legit tickets were scalped out with the average listing price being a whopping $12,590.
There’s good reason to be hopeful tickets will go on sale within a reasonable time frame for this fight. But Goldberg still estimates we’ll see similar prices for Mayweather vs. McGregor, with it costing around $3000 to get in the door and an average ticket sale price of $6500. That’s assuming you manage to get one of the tickets released to the public. Otherwise, prepare yourself for an average listing price of $13,000 on the secondary markets.
That’s a hell of a lot of money for a fight of questionable legitimacy, but there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the event will sell out instantly and become one of the hottest tickets in sports history.
