The NBA All-Star game is supposed to be a celebration of the talent across the league, with an All-Star selection vindication for players of all the blood, sweat, and tears they have put into their careers, and an opportunity to play in the game, and etch their name into history with the all-time greats.
While the competitiveness of the game has long been called into question, leading to major changes to the format, the fact remains that the All-Star Weekend is a showpiece event for the NBA. With it being hosted in the league’s newest arena, the $2bn Inuit Dome in Los Angeles, the NBA would have expected a packed arena for the All-Star Weekend. However, the reality was very different.
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For the games on Friday and Saturday, photos and videos went viral, highlighting a near-empty arena. While it may be argued that the Rising Stars game, the 3-point contest, and the Dunk Contest are not the highlights of the weekend, the reality is that minutes before tip-off for Sunday’s main event, the Intuit Dome was not even close to full capacity.
While the NBA has finally created an engaging format – lots of responses to the game from media and fans alike were positive, given the level of play on show – the reality is that no one was in the arena to see it. The All-Star game had tickets priced between $1,000-$1,700 for Sunday and between $500-$900 for All-Star Saturday night.
While media, influencers, and former US Presidents were in attendance – Barack Obama was even interviewed on the broadcast – the people whom the NBA wanted there stayed away. Regular fans are simply not going to pay the prices the NBA demands for the game, and this is a problem that goes beyond the All-Star game.
For the first time in years, the NBA played a game in London at the O2 Arena, with the cheapest tickets going for £90 while seats at the top of the stands sold for £160. This is simply unaffordable for most for a regular season game, never mind the All-Star ticket prices, so it does call into question the strategy behind the pricing.
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By GlobalDataThe NBA is not alone here. The FIFA World Cup taking place this summer across the US, Canada & Mexico has been criticized for pricing out fans, with tickets for group stage games not involving a host nation ranging from $120 to $265, while tickets for the World Cup Final went on sale for $4,185.
The Football Association shared pricing information with the England Supporters Travel Club, which showed that if an England fan bought a ticket for every game through to the final, it would cost just over $7,000 for tickets alone.
This does not consider travel, accommodation, and expenses while travelling across the country for the event. The Premier League has seen fans protesting ticket prices, with the ‘£20 is plenty’ campaign pushing for a cap on away ticket prices.
However, Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has bemoaned the low price of tickets at Old Trafford, suggesting that if Fulham could charge £60, why wouldn’t Manchester United charge more, fundamentally missing the point of soccer being a working-class sport, with Manchester United situated in a working-class city.
Ratcliffe has scrapped the protected ticket prices for the likes of Old Age Pensioners and children, with tickets for ‘in demand’ fixtures costing as much as £97 for the 2025-26 season.
WWE has been at the center of a ticket-pricing firestorm in the run-up to its annual showpiece event, WrestleMania. For the second consecutive year, WrestleMania is going to be hosted in Las Vegas, having originally been set for New Orleans. WWE then hastily backtracked on this decision and announced that for the first time, the showpiece would be held in the same city and the same venue in consecutive years.
While no official reason was given for this, the fact that WrestleMania 41, which took place in April 2025, generated just over $66m in ticket revenue, making it the most lucrative event in pro wrestling history, is likely a key reason why WWE parent company TKO is so keen on a repeat performance.
TKO chief operating officer Mark Shapiro is on record saying that “WWE is not where the UFC is yet in ticket yield. We have work to do there. We know we have a lot of room there because Vince McMahon was primarily pricing tickets for families and wasn’t totally focused on maxing the opportunity there.”
This is evidenced by the increase in average ticket price for WrestleMania in recent years – WrestleMania 37 in 2021 charged an average of $170 while WrestleMania 41 had an average ticket price of $635, a staggering 274% increase in five years. The issue is already coming into stark focus this year, with ticket sales for WrestleMania 42 slower than expected, having sold 10,000 fewer tickets this year to the corresponding point last year, and having to change its pricing strategy considering this.
While organizations across the sporting spectrum are entitled to charge whatever they wish for tickets, the reality is that they are pricing out not only their core support but also their future generation of fans. Industry leaders often complain that they are competing with other forms of entertainment for the attention spans of younger people, with greater competition from video games, streaming services, and social media meaning younger people are no longer watching full games, so they attempt to make changes to their formats so that they can engage younger fans who are no longer watching full games, which fundamentally misses the point.
Younger people are no longer engaging in sports as they are no longer made to feel welcome. If you don’t get to experience a live sporting event as a youngster, if you don’t feel the energy within a venue, why would it be of interest to you? As the cost-of-living crisis grows, there is less disposable income for people to buy things like tickets to sporting events.
If going to a soccer match costs a family of four close to $400, this is simply unaffordable long-term. Industry leaders like Shapiro are focusing on maximizing revenue for shareholders today, so they develop pricing strategies to do that. However, when they kill off interest in their sports, when the next generation of sports fans isn’t there, what is the play at that point?
When the affluent move on to other things because the buzz and excitement simply isn’t there when attending sports games, because the hardcore fans are no longer attending and generating atmosphere, how will those revenues be maximized? There is no answer to this in the short term, but eventually, fans will get to a point where they can no longer be exploited, either due to financial constraints or general apathy.
Leaders in the sports industry think that they can exploit fandom without consequence, expecting fans to continue paying whatever they charge to show their support.
Yet when there is no loyalty there, merely a transactional relationship, the sports industry will find out rather quickly what an empty venue does to a product that relies on the passion of fans to create a marketable product. The NBA got a taste of that reality over the All-Star Weekend, and, likely, others will soon begin to join them. The question is whether the sports industry changes course before it is too late.
