High school football games are much cheaper to attend than NFL games. What do high school football tickets cost?
Most high school football tickets are cheap – only six or eight dollars. In some states, such as Texas, they are more expensive because of the popularity of high school football. The best seats for some games can cost more than a hundred dollars.
As a high school and professional football fan in Texas, I know that high school football is more expensive here because of the price of the stadiums. Some high school football stadiums cost a fortune here, and more expensive tickets help pay for them.
High school football tickets are much cheaper than college football tickets. College football tickets are sometimes much cheaper than professional football tickets, but can easily be more expensive. Playoff games are significantly more expensive. High school football tickets are cheap. A high school football game costs only around $7, and a middle school game only $3. NFL tickets cost $151 on average and usually cost at least $75. College football tickets cost $175 on average – even more than NFL tickets – but may only cost $30. Better seats are a lot more expensive than cheaper seats, especially the best seats.
Probably most high school football tickets cost less than $10. They might cost only $5 for an adult or $3 for a student. Tickets may be more expensive in some states than others. In Texas, where high school football is so important, people will watch high school football during the hottest part of the year. Tickets might cost $25. Tickets in good seats for some games can cost $100 or more. Season passes can make it a lot cheaper.
The popularity of professional football drives the prices up. High school football has many fans, but people are usually interested in high school football, so the prices are lower. Also, schools want to be inclusive and not make their tickets so affordable that everyone can’t participate in the fun. This is part of why high schools provide expensive equipment to the players.
Some are quite large, but most are small and all are much smaller than the bigger professional football stadiums. The largest stadiums have room for more than 20,000 fans. The largest three are Fawcett Stadium in Ohio (now known as Tom Bennett Hall of Fame Stadium), with a capacity of 22,400, Toyota Stadium in Texas (20,500), and Memorial Stadium in Texas (about 20,000). Usually, high school football stadiums are much smaller, and there may be only three with a capacity of over 20,000 in the United States. Many other stadiums have a capacity of over 10,000, but most have a capacity of only 2,000 to 5,000.
High school football games usually fill less than half of the seats, and they may limit the number of fans to fewer than the full capacity. For example, a stadium with a capacity of 5844 might only allow 1753 people to enter if they limit attendance to 30% of the max capacity. Other stadiums set the limit at 50% or more. Attendance dropped in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic, but it has recovered since then.
For high school football, better seats might also be cheap. Even the playoffs might be cheap – less than $20 a lot of the time. Prices are higher in some states. More expensive NFL tickets can be very expensive. Average superbowl tickets cost more than 5000 dollars, the best seats cost tens of thousands of dollars.
A lot of people want to watch live football and there are only so many seats in the stadiums. This allows the stadiums to set the prices high without selling too few seats. Anything scarce that people want is expensive.
It doesn’t come mostly from ticket sales. Advertising makes the NFL more money than tickets for live games do. However, ticket sales still matter and the NFL would be significantly less profitable without them. NFL tickets are also expensive because the stadiums cost money to maintain and cost a lot of money to build. People who invest in building stadiums want to make as much money as possible and this requires expensive tickets. NFL tickets will probably remain expensive in the future because supply and demand won’t change that much. They won’t build a huge number of new stadiums, and football will stay popular.
Professional football is more expensive than baseball. If you take your whole family to an NFL game, it costs an average of $568.18, compared to $376 for an NHL game or $253 for a baseball game. These prices include other common purchases and not just tickets and are for a family of four. Some teams are more expensive than others. A family of four can watch the Las Vegas Raiders for $778.66 or the Cincinnati Bengals for $437.30. High school games are also cheap for other sports. A high school baseball game may cost something like $6 for adults or $3 for students. Prices for high school basketball, wrestling, and hockey are similar.
