Lionel Messi celebrates his second goal of the match between Honduras and Argentina at Hard Rock Stadium, Miami, September 23, 2022.
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It’s 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 soaring.
Secondary ticket market StubHub says sales for Inter Miami’s games starting in July are up nearly 28 times since the announcement.
As many tickets have already been sold for matches from July 2023 as for the entire 2022 season compared to last year at this time, according to the ticket sales company.
The chance to see Messi, widely regarded as one of the greatest footballers of all time and a winner of last year’s World Cup, will not come cheap.
Average ticket prices on StubHub for the team owned by David Beckham have increased 4.5 times, from $24.52 to $124.51 since the news broke.
Another secondary ticketing site, Vivid Seats, reported that the average price to attend a Leagues Cup match between Mexican League’s Cruz Azul and Inter Miami has increased by 1,021%. On June 4, a ticket cost $122, and six days later that same ticket cost $1,413.
In just a few days, Inter Miami went from the seventh best selling team of the 2023 season to the fourth best selling team for season sales on StubHub.
“Supply is limited,” sports analyst Joe Pompliano said on CNBC’s “Last Call.”
“If you look at the stadium in Miami, they only have 18,000 seats. If you look across Europe, especially Barcelona [where Messi spent most of his career], they have 100,000 seats. There is a fundamental imbalance in the equation of supply and demand that we see,” he added.
This is all for a team that sits last place in the Eastern Conference of the MLS and is now recently looking for a new coach firing third-year coach Phil Neville.
Not only Miami is seeing the upswing, Messi’s future competitors are also seeing a bump.
“Messi will draw football fans across the country and draw fans to away games, just as we see with big stars in the NFL and NBA,” said Adam Budelli, a StubHub spokesperson.
Messi and Inter Miami visit LAFC at SoFi Stadium on September 3. Sales for the game went from the 15th best-selling event of the season to the second – and it’s on track to easily become the No. 1 event of the season. LAFC season, StubHub data shows.
In Miami, not only ticket sales are doing well. Merchandise is also taking off.
Fanatics won’t start printing the Messi Inter Miami FC jerseys until the deal is official, but fans are already collecting teamwear in droves.
The digital sports platform says more Inter Miami merchandise has been sold since Wednesday than the previous two months combined.
As of Wednesday, Inter Miami is one of the top five best-selling teams in all sports on the Fanatics network.
Meanwhile, Inter Miami is preparing to cash in on its future global audience.
According to Josh Gerben, trademark attorney at Gerben Law, the team submitted an application June 5 to trademark the phrase “LIBERTAD PARA SOÑAR,” the Spanish translation of the team’s slogan, “Freedom to Dream.”
