Worst Mayweather-Pacquiao Seats Will Still Cost $5,000
Tickets for the fight of the century already cost more than the Super Bowl.
— -- Tickets for the Mayweather-Pacquiao boxing match, called the "fight of the century," have creeped up on Super Bowl prices, but what you’ll pay for the worst seat in the house might surprise you.
Floyd “Money” Mayweather will face eight-division world champion Manny “Pac-Man” Pacquiao May 2, 3 p.m. ET, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, a battle that has been in the works but stalled for the past several years.
Tickets finally went on sale to the public Thursday, after the two fighters' camps settled contract details and how tickets would be allotted. Tickets sold out in less than one minute, according to TiqIQ, an event ticket search engine. Though the starting retail price was $1,500, there were only 500 tickets sold to the general public for boxing's richest fight ever, though the arena holds about 16,000 people.
Forty percent of the remaining tickets went to the MGM Grand and 25 percent to each of the fighters’ camps.
So, unless you know Mayweather and Pacquiao, the only way to get in now is through the resale market. Even the fighters have said they were inundated with requests from their circles when the match was announced in February.
The average ticket price sold so far on StubHub is $6,362, with a range of $5,000 to $12,000. The lowest-priced ticket sold so far on StubHub is around $4,500, the company told ABC news. Those are for seats in the Upper 202 section, a corner area that's arguably among the worst.
The average ticket price for this year's Super Bowl was $10,466.11, according to TiqIQ.
You can see here, from one $4,500 seat, that you get a better view of the Jumbotron than the action below:
"The best way to describe these seats are like sitting in the last row for any basketball court but all the action happening at center court," said Chris Matcovich, vice president of data and communications of TiqIQ.
Matcovich said even the worst seats in the house are on sale for $5,000 on TiqIQ's website. There are 14 seats in section 205, row Q, that are the second to last row in that section. Their list price: $4,575. And ticket prices are likely to remain high leading up to the fight, given the few available on the resale market, according to Matcovich.
“I would imagine they aren’t that terrible, honestly,” StubHub spokesman Cameron Papp said about the cheapest tickets. “This is a small arena so I doubt there are many bad seats in the house. That’s what we’re seeing as far as sales on StubHub. Most of the tickets being bought are for the cheapest available – people just want to get in to this historic event.”