Report: NFL has tickets of mass destruction, but only for 90 minutes.

The league announced yesterday that 15,000 extra tickets that went on sale last week sold out in just 30mins. Coupled with the 40,000 sold in May, this means that the vast majority of tickets available publicly have now been snapped up for the San Diego Superchargers @ New Orleans Saints @ Wembley game this October. You can expect a very small final sale of any confiscated or unsold tickets as we head towards the home stretch.

We have one gripe with the league on this one, and that was the original claim that those 40,000 tickets sold out in just 90mins. Whilst we are right behind NFLUK's efforts to promote the London series, and we'll come out and say it right now:

It's questionable at best.

If 40,000 tickets went on sale at 10am, and were sold out by 11:30am, then why were we able to buy tickets at 12:30pm?



The NFL released a further 5000 tickets sometime on the 29th May. If that is the reason, then it is interesting that tickets were still being sold at around 22:30pm on that night, according to many customers. Some have expressed the feeling that because the extra tickets were not publicised as well, people were not trying to buy the extra tickets, but that doesn't make any sense at all, and here's why:

Consider that between 11:30am and 22:30pm, just 5000 tickets were sold. Many fans purchased multiple tickets too, so, to put a conservative estimate on it, around 2-3,000 people bought tickets in a 12hr span, during which the NFL sent out emails to all members, and released a press statement at 1pm.

It's that fact that makes us doubt the original claim of 90mins. If that was the case, why, then, were we able to purchase four on a whim, after the 90mins, but before the extra 5000 were released? We imagine that there were plenty of people who did likewise, and forums were inundated with people

What annoys us most about this, is that there is no shame in selling out your ticket allocation over the course of a whole day. The sport is thriving in Britain, and frankly, the ability to pretty much guarantee that you'll sell all available tickets is all the NFLUK team need to be able to present to the NFL when they make their case to host a third consecutive game next season.

We think that this is a carefully planned strategy by the NFLUK marketing team to exaggerate popularity and convince those in two minds about purchasing tickets to splash the cash. Again, we really don't want to knock the NFL, nor the chances of the UK staging future games, but it's important to retain integrity and honesty - especially with the fans.