The Most Expensive Super Bowl

Robbie Lofredo will celebrate his 13th birthday Sunday in grand fashion. His aunt and uncle, who is a New York hedge fund trader, are taking him to Super Bowl XLII, and he'll be sitting in a prime seat, the kind generally reserved for the rich, the famous, and the powerful.

The three tickets, which together cost $29,350, are being paid for by a West Coast brokerage firm that does a substantial business with the hedge fund.

Robbie, an avid New York Giants fan, will be one of 73,000 attendees at the crown jewel of 2008's sporting events, which will be held this year at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., and be seen by an estimated 1 billion people worldwide.

Tickets to this year's Super Bowl, the most expensive ever, have gone through the roof. Depending on the thickness of your wallet, tickets range from $2,500 for a single seat to $379,000, or about $21,000 a person, for an 18-person luxury suite on the 25-yard line. Most of the available tickets are controlled by a rapidly expanding $2.5 billion industry that was once known as scalping but is now a perfectly legal online secondary market. This new business model, where consumers can go online and pay a premium for hard-to-get tickets to desirable events ranging from sports games to Broadway shows, is steered by some established companies, as well as many fly-by-night firms. Literally thousands of online companies are making a market in this year's Super Bowl tickets, of which about 10,000 were originally offered for public consumption, largely through lotteries, and sold initially for between $700 and $900 a ticket. Most of the companies offering these tickets, as might be expected, charge a service fee, which is generally 10% and up.

Currently, online companies own about 7,000 of the remaining Super Bowl tickets, the founder of LiveStub.com, Michael Hershfield, says. His firm has about 300 tickets priced between $2,500 and $12,500. With demand far outstripping supply, he estimates that by Friday his firm's remaining tickets will increase in price to $3,000 to $14,000. By kickoff, he says, all the tickets will be gone.

Calculating the economics of going to the Super Bowl, Mr. Hershfield figures you can do it on the cheap for about $4,200, which would include a $2,500 admission ticket, a flight with plenty of stopovers, and a stay at one of the cheapest hotels in the Phoenix area. Or, if you're willing to loosen the purse strings, a trip could cost $18,000, including a better seat at the game, a direct flight, and a good hotel room in Glendale.

The industry's biggest player, StubHub.com, an eBay subsidiary with annual sales of more than $500 million, has about 3,500 tickets for sale ranging from $2,500 in the cheapest sections to $11,000 in a suite along the 10-yard line. It has only 60 tickets left that are priced below $3,000. StubHub's average ticket price is $4,329.

Another industry biggie with a $250 million annual volume, TicketsNow.com, owned by Ticketmaster, offers some of the most expensive tickets to this year's Super Bowl, including that $379,000 18-person suite. What do you get for about $21,000 a person? Aside from being there at the big game, a premium open bar, a high-end buffet, including steak and lobster, and private bathroom facilities, a spokesman tells me.

Luxury suites from TicketsNow with similar offerings are also available in the end zone for 24 people ($276,000), 20 people ($207,000), and eight people ($185,150). Its sales of individual tickets — which range from $2,782 to $18,725 — are selling at a very good clip, a company spokeswoman, Joellen Ferrer, says.

Who's going to win the big game? The latest Las Vegas odds quote the New England Patriots a 12 1 /2-point favorite over the Giants, although I'm told the odds could change dramatically if there's any substance to reports that Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is injured.

dandordan@aol.com