Super Bowl Ticket Fiasco Turned Some Fans' Super Bowl into a Nightmare

Eventually, it appears as though about 1,250 fans who had purchased tickets were not allowed to sit in them because the seats were deemed unsafe by the Fire Marshall. Many of those fans were eventually able to be relocated, but not all. About 400 fans were not able to watch the game from a seat. Numerous stories have surfaced about fans who were displaced. At least one fan has called the NFL selling seats that they couldn’t deliver fraud.

The NFL offered these fans who were not able to use the tickets 3x the face value of the seats, and some reports have surfaced that they will get tickets to the next Super Bowl. Do you think the NFL does anything without reason? That the 3x the face value was just pulled out of the air? Probably not. They probably recognized potential for greater claims of economic damages for people that traveled from long distances in anticipation of attending the game. The Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a consumer protection statute in the state where the game was played, also allows tripling of economic damages in certain situations, when the conduct of the defendant was committed knowingly or intentionally.

The news came out yesterday that the NFL was aware of the potential issue in the week leading up to the game. From the article, “the league knew last week there were problems with the installation of the temporary seating sections and hoped until hours before kickoff Sunday they could be fixed.” The NFL hoped that they could resolve the issues, and they didn’t. Rather than let people know before they spent more money in reliance on having a ticket, they gambled and lost.

Economic damages may not be limited to just the face value of the ticket. Based on some of the angry fan articles about the tickets, I would guess there will be some phone calls from the Wisconsin and Pittsburgh area codes to Texas attorneys to see what might be included in economic damages under the Texas law, for those fans who paid for airfare, hotel, took time off work, and all sorts of other things in reliance on having a valid ticket to the game. And you can bet that the NFL will be asked “to open its books” to show when, and what, it knew about any ticket issues. The NFL better hope they didn’t know anything else earlier than what has already come out.

The NFL also better figure out how to address this and prevent it in the future, as Goodell has said they will do. You cannot sell tickets that you cannot deliver. If you do, you are just an institutional version of Art Schlichter.

[photo via Getty]