Lionel Messi celebrates his second goal within the match between Honduras and Argentina at Hard Rock Stadium, Miami, September 23, 2022.
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It has been three days since football legend Lionel Messi shocked the football world by announcing his move to MLS club Inter Miami FC after parting ways with Paris Saint-Germain, and ticket prices across the league are already rising.
Secondary ticketing market StubHub says sales of Inter Miami games starting in July have increased nearly 28 times because the announcement.
As many tickets have already been sold for matches since July 2023 as in your complete 2022 season compared to this era last 12 months, the ticketing company said.
The possibility to see Messi, well known as one in every of the best footballers of all time and last 12 months’s World Cup winner, won’t be low cost.
Average StubHub ticket prices for a band owned by David Beckham have increased 4.5 times, jumping from $24.52 to $124.51 because the news was posted.
One other secondary ticketing site, Vivid Seats, reported that the common price to attend a League Cup game between Mexican league clubs Cruz Azul and Inter Miami from the Mexican league increased by 1,021%. On June 4, the ticket cost $122, and 6 days later the identical ticket cost $1,413.
In only just a few days, Inter Miami moved from the seventh best-selling team within the 2023 season to the fourth-best-selling team by season sales on StubHub.
“Supply is restricted,” sports business analyst Joe Pompliano told CNBC’s Last Call.
“If you happen to have a look at Miami Stadium, they only have 18,000 seats. Whenever you have a look at Europe, especially in Barcelona [where Messi spent most of his career]have 100,000 seats. We’re seeing a fundamental imbalance within the equation of supply and demand,” he added.
It’s all for the team that sits last place within the MLS Eastern Conference and is currently on the lookout for a latest coach firing third-year head coach Phil Neville.
Miami is not the just one seeing growth – Messi’s future competitors are also seeing growth.
“Messi will attract football fans across the country by bringing fans to away games similar to the massive stars of the NFL and NBA,” said Adam Budelli, a spokesman for StubHub.
Messi and Inter Miami will visit LAFC at SoFi Stadium on September 3. The sales of this match moved from the fifteenth best-selling event of the season to the second place – and is on target to easily develop into the #1 event of the season. LAFC season, StubHub figures show.
In Miami, it isn’t just ticket sales which can be seeing good growth. The product can be expanding.
Fanatics won’t start printing Inter Miami’s Messi shirts until the deal is official, but fans are already collecting large amounts of drugs for the team.
The digital sports platform says more Inter Miami merchandise has been sold since Wednesday than within the previous two months combined.
As of Wednesday, Inter Miami is in the highest five best-selling teams across all sports on the Fanatics network.
Meanwhile, Inter Miami is gearing up to money in on its future global audience.
According to Josh Gerben, a trademark attorney at Gerben Law, the team submitted an application June 5 to trademark the phrase “LIBERTAD PARA SOÑAR”, a Spanish translation of the band’s slogan “Freedom to Dream”.
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