New Jersey resident Josh Finkelman has sued the National Football League accusing it of pricing average football fans out of the Super Bowl, where this year's championship game will play at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford on February 2, The Associated Press reported.
Finkleman says that the league has "made only 1 percent of all tickets available to the public for purchase at face value. He says that most fans must buy their tickets on the secondary market where they can command thousands of dollars," The AP also reported.
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in federal court in Newark. The NFL is violating the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, according to the lawsuit, which the league said is reviewing. "It notes that three-quarters of the game's tickets are given to teams, which sell them at face value to fans who win lotteries," according to The AP.
The NFL said it expected "the most expensive tickets for its championship game will be about $2,600 each for 9,000 premium seats," The AP also reported. This doubles the amount for similar tickets at last year's Super Bowl in New Orleans.
"Read the provisions (of the New Jersey statute, they are clear as day. The NFL just blew it. They just blew it. They just didn't get the fact that there's law in New Jersey that prohibts what they are doing. I don't think the NFL denies that the Average Joe has no access to the tickets... They hold a lottery where the general pubic gets 1 percent," said Bruce Nagel, Finkelman's lawyer.
Nagel said he reached the 1 percent figure by relying on "a widely adopted number reached by many independent analyses that have been done," according to The Star Ledger.
