The UFL released its 2026 schedule on Thursday. Special attention goes to the first home games in new markets Louisville (March 27), Orlando (March 29) and Columbus (April 3). We’ll see if this is the year spring football gets some momentum.
Levi's Stadium, the location of Super Bowl 50 and this year's Super Bowl. levis-stadium-24-crop-u52340
At the first Super Bowl at Levi’s Stadium in 2016, the face value price of a field level seat in the end zone was $1,800. This year, those same seats are $4,250, an increase of 136 percent in 10 years, according to documents obtained by SBJ. (Ticketing experts often say lower-bowl end zone seats are the best way to compare ticket prices across years.)
More than doubling in a decade appears aggressive at first, but some context goes a long way. One insider suggested I compare it to the most popular Chanel handbag. I did — it was $4,900 in 2016, and $11,300 in 2025, or a similar increase of 131%. And that’s what a Super Bowl ticket is: a highly visible luxury item in a world where the rich keep getting richer and are seemingly prepared to pay almost anything for a distinctive product or experience. Furthermore, the secondary market makes it clear the NFL could be more aggressive with pricing.
Brian Basloe, CEO of Concierge Live, which develops and sells software to manage corporate tickets, called the rate of increase “conservative” but noted the practical limitations of face value for retail buyers.
“The NFL has done a good job of curating their price to be as reasonable as possible, understanding that it’s the most popular event every year,” said Basloe, who was SVP at official NFL hospitality provider On Location from 2017-18. “However, consumers’ ability to get tickets directly from the NFL is pretty limited, and the gap in both pricing and availability is filled by the hospitality companies.”
Nevertheless, face value matters immensely in the B2B sector. It’s the cost basis to hospitality packages and the entire resale market. Face value also sets the cost of tickets that major NFL and team sponsors/media rights holders can access under the terms of their contracts and the price that the participating teams’ season-ticket holders pay. The NFL wants to maximize revenue but not alienate its best customers and business partners.
“We track resale very closely and understand there is a spread,” said NFL Chief Spokesman Brian McCarthy. “That is part of the balance of charging fair primary prices knowing there is a gap. Also, the secondary prices are on a much smaller universe of tickets.”
A few other insights stand out from comparing face-value data at Levi’s Stadium from Super Bowl 50 to 60:
The most expensive non-suite seats, club seats on the 50-yard line on the stadium’s west side, are only up 13% since 2016 ($7,500 to $8,500). But the face value of those tickets is just a small component to the extensive luxury packages On Location has built around them, so I’m cautioned against making too many conclusions there. Most of the other club seats have seen much higher face value growth.
Tickets prices are far more stratified, with 19 price points this year instead of 11 in 2016, which reflects the industry’s increasing capability to account for subtle differences in demand across the market.
All pricing reflects some concern about politics and public relations, but the NFL puts special priority on having some tickets that stay under $1,000.“We maintain a price at $950 every year — 8%-12% of seats usually on average. We also give away 500 tickets every year for free,” McCarthy said. The extreme upper corners of Levi’s Stadium could surely sell on resale markets for far more than $950. The cheapest seats in 2016 at Levi’s were $500, according to the documents, with another tranche at $850.
Seahawks mascot Blitz has been appearing at Starbucks stores in Seattle this week, hyping fans up for the NFC Championship game. Seahawks
Team marketers and sponsors are scrambling this week to leverage the conference championship games, which are the most valuable NFL assets located in home markets but also carry the downside of not being scheduled until seven days out. Here’s a look at three of the teams and their sponsors’ efforts (the Patriots declined to provide details) to get maximum value and extend the commercial life of the playoff run:
Denver
The Broncos will take over Larimer Square on Saturday for a free fan rally with Miles the Mascot, Broncos cheerleaders and their official DJ, DJ Squizzy. Sponsors activating on-site include official health care sponsor CommonSpirit Health and official credit union Ent, which is also participating in a Larimer Square jersey display that’s already up.
CommonSpirit is the official presenting partner of the Pats-Broncos game the following day, which includes branded rally towels for attendees, additional signage, social and digital graphics, a south stadium banner, concession billboards, game-day PA and emails.
Ent has been the official sponsor of the team’s social/digital “Climb Higher” postseason campaign, appearing in most of the team’s content since the end of the regular season. Blackjack Pizza ran a sweepstakes Wednesday, with a grand prize featuring four tickets and pregame field passes. Branded giveaways are available at Valvoline (posters) and King Soopers (a magnet created by King Soopers and KUSA).
Seattle
Friday’s the big day. The team will conduct a ceremonial “12 Flag” raising at the Space Needle with Seahawks legend Cliff Avril, and also will launch their “ChampionSHIP’ takeover, with the Blue Thunder drum line, Seahawks dancers and DJ Supa Sam boarding a large Seahawks-branded boat for a cruise along the shores of Lake Union and Lake Washington, ending in a fan rally Friday night.
Around town, Boeing, PEMCO and Virgina Mason Medical Center all hosted 12 Flag raisings at their HQs. Seahawks mascot Blitz has been appearing at Starbucks locations all week. Snoqualmie Casino is hosting a Blue Friday rally. Washington’s Lottery activated at Tacoma Mall with scratch-off lotto tickets offering winners free tickets to the game.
At the game itself, the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe is the game-day sponsor, which means it has branding on the press conference podium at the team practice facility this week, inclusion on the “Know Before You Go” fan emails, four video board features at the game and a package of social and digital assets related to the game.Coca-Cola and Safeway are branding green rally towels, and Columbia Bank is sponsoring a halftime show with singer Tucker Wetmore.
Los Angeles
For the traveling Rams, SoFi Stadium is hosting an ambitious watch party Sunday, with 1800 Tequila as the presenting partner. The tequila brand will do product samplings, custom cocktails at stadium bars, branding on in-stadium signage, logo integration on all event communications and social content from the event.
Also during the watch party, Bud Light will have branding on the primary video board as it shows the end of the AFC championship game prior to the Rams’ game, pairing the “Bud Light Sports Bar” with a $5 Bud Light special. Hyundai is hosting a former player signing, and Audi will display a video and do a giveaway. Tickets to the watch party cost $10 for the general public and $5 for season ticket holders. Prior to SoFi opening, the Rams will host a 12-and-under flag football tournament on the field.
Thursday night, the Rams marketing crew will be at the Intuit Dome ahead of Lakers-Clippers, activating their “Earn the Right Playoff Popup,” where fans are encouraged to create content out of their impression of iconic Rams moments from this season.
Robert Kraft is a member of the NFL's management council executive committee, which sets direction for negotiations with the NFLPA. Getty Images
I thought the 18th-game debate would only start up again at the traditional dueling Super Bowl week press conferences, when Roger Goodell and the NFLPA executive director traditionally do their most extensive annual public remarks, sometimes within hours of each other.
But Patriots owner Robert Kraft decided to get things going Tuesday, when he laid out the vision for an expanded schedule on Boston’s “Zolak & Bertrand” show on WBZ-FM. He said the 18th game would create enough game inventory to enable every team to play an international game and that the league could create it by dropping one preseason game, keeping the total number of uniformed games at 20. (This isn’t new information to you, a savvy SBJ reader.)
Kraft deployed the NFL’s best rhetorical trick on this subject: He didn’t bother with the conditional I just used. Kraft said “will” go to 18 games, and “will” play annually abroad, not stopping to even acknowledge directly the need for NFLPA agreement. (Incidentally, NFLPA sign off is required for both an 18th game and to expand beyond 10 international games.)
This is smart because a fair bit of media coverage simply repeated the fait accompli phrasing, which puts the players union at a rhetorical disadvantage. For what it’s worth, the players union declined to comment on Kraft’s remarks for now.
Kraft, a member of the NFL’s committee that oversees union negotiations, did acknowledge the labor angle indirectly. He said: “Part of the reason is so we can continue to grow the cap and keep our labor happy.”
But the union will say Kraft’s position, while perhaps logical on its face, actually has things backward about the nature of the problem. Kraft is saying they need more games, because they need more money, because they need to grow the salary cap, because the union needs to be happy.
The union, whoever its leaders are heading into this battle, could just as easily argue that they’d be happier without an 18th game, because that would mean more injuries and shorter careers, jeopardizing their ability to benefit from the larger revenue. So Kraft and his pals, they’ll say, are offering a solution to a problem they themselves are creating. Why simply not create the problem in the first place? After all, the current contract is still good for five more years.
Of course, it all boils down to: What’s the NFLPA’s price for a longer season? But how you frame the question matters.
Buffalo’s top business executive, Pete Guelli, has a new title: president of business operations for the Bills and Sabres. But little is changing when it comes to his day-to-day job. He has the same direct reports — for the Bills, that’s Chief Administrative Officer Josh Dziurlikowski, Chief Strategy Officer Kate Hussmann and Chief Commercial Officer Jason Hartlund — and he continues to report to owner Terry Pegula. His title bump coincides with GM Brandon Beane becoming president of football operations/GM. Guelli’s old title, chief operating officer, was perhaps incongruous with Beane being a president of one side of the team’s operations.
This week’s SBJ Sports Media Podcast features NFL media chief Hans Schroeder, who talks with Karp about the Monday night Wild Card window, which ESPN once held, and how it’s not a lock that the league sticks with the status quo an extends the deal. “People see that window and the attractiveness of it. And again, we thought that that’s been a great change and a great evolution we’ve taken. And so, we’ll have those conversations now in the next couple months about what we do and how we partner and think about that Monday night window.”
As part of an upcoming longform interview on “The Sports Media Podcast,” Richie Zyontz and Rich Russo, the lead producer and director for the Tom Brady-Kevin Burkhardt-Erin Andrews-Tom Rinaldi crew on Fox, share specifics with SBJ’s Richard Deitsch about Brady’s improvement in the booth this season.
Video game companies are looking for novel ways to reach out to players (old and new), with Blizzard Entertainment using an NFL Divisional round playoff game for the first time to promote World of Warcraft, notes Jason Wilson in his recent SBJ Gaming newsletter.
