Week 18’s Sunday night matchup between the Minnesota Vikings and Detroit Lions could very well be the best in NFL regular season history, featuring two teams with 14-2 records — the most combined wins in a non-playoff game.
With a No. 1 seed in the NFC playoffs and a first-round bye at stake, the Vikings are spending considerable resources to make sure they have strong fan representation at Detroit’s Ford Field. To be exact, the team has spent nearly $2 million.
Leading up to Sunday’s game, the Vikings purchased approximately 1,900 tickets at the Lions’ home stadium on the secondary market at around $1,000 per ticket, according to Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer. The team then offered its season ticket holders an opportunity via email to buy the seats at a much lower price — some of them for as low as $200 per ticket.
The Lions noticed the activity and discovered the email from the Vikings offering their season ticket base “the opportunity to purchase lower-level seats for Sunday night’s game. Mostly located behind the visiting team’s bench area at Ford Field, the tickets were offered on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Additionally, Minnesota stated that the tickets were “intended to be used by Vikings fans and not positioned for resale.”
However, ticket buyers being ticket buyers, the idea of fair play wasn’t followed by all purchasers, as Breer detailed.
“One ticketholder sold their seat on the secondary market for $724. The buyer then turned around and sold the ticket to Advantage Tickets, a company the Vikings worked with, for $1,200,” he wrote. “The Vikings then sold the ticket to a season ticket holder for $300. The season ticket holder, in turn, sold it on the secondary market for $690. That buyer was, potentially, a broker, since the ticket is back on the market again.”
The path of that particular ticket attracted the Lions’ notice and the team contacted the NFL to flag what the Vikings were doing. Yet the league said that Minnesota didn’t break any rules by doing this, Breer reported.
The Vikings insist that they intended to give players’ and staffers’ families a better vantage point — and perhaps more of an opportunity to affect crowd noise near their sideline — by purchasing seats beyond the 600 or so seats that are typically made available to the road team.
“Given the uniqueness of this game, we wanted to offer our stakeholders — staff, family, season ticket members and team partners — an opportunity to attend,” Vikings spokesman Jeff Anderson said in a statement to SI.
Will 2,000 fans make a difference amid the 65,000 capacity of Ford Field likely to be filled mostly with roaring Lions fans cheering their team on to win its first-ever No. 1 playoff seed and hopeful first step toward the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance? Perhaps not.
However, the Vikings’ willingness to pay significant money to give its fans (or “stakeholders”) a presence in arguably the most important road game in team history is certainly notable. Admirable, even, considering the NFL says no rules were broken with this initiative.
The Lions defeated the Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium in Week 7, 31-29, on a 44-yard Jake Bates field goal with 19 seconds remaining in the game.
