2028 LA Olympics tickets spark outrage with $6,000 price tags
The organizers of the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles continued to roll out tickets, with packages of preferred seats and suites going on sale this week. A pair of seats to one men's basketball semifinal could cost you $5,000. Two preferred seats to the women's basketball final are listed on the LA28 website at a total of $6,000. And a night that will feature four finals at SoFi Stadium's swim complex will cost two people up to $4,750.
Such prices have set off howls of protest from some fans. But the man who practically invented the modern ticket business has an answer to the naysayers: Get over yourselves.
"I am proud of the fact that our city got the Olympics," said Fred Rosen, the former chief executive who built Ticketmaster into an industry behemoth. "And I am also proud of the fact that people understand it's not something the city can afford to subsidize."
One of the prime revenue streams that LA28 organizers will use to make sure the Games make money - and don't require a subsidy from L.A. or the state of California - is to charge fair-market prices for tickets, Rosen said.
"The L.A. Olympic [Organizing] Committee has every right to sell assets. It has to do that to make sure the city doesn't pay any money," Rosen said in a phone interview from his home in Bel-Air. "And the fair value is determined by whether people pay for the tickets or not."
Rosen realizes that not everyone will like his opinion. Though he has been retired from Ticketmaster for years, critics may cite a decision this month in which a federal jury found that Beverly Hills-based Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary operated a monopoly over concert venues.
Rosen declined to comment on that outcome, but said that the company he built had never faced sustained complaints from the primary customers it serves - venue owners, teams and performers who chose to have Ticketmaster sell seats to their events. Rosen said his business provided a "heat shield" to scores of companies and individuals, who did not have to absorb the acid responses the public always seems to have about ticket prices.
The ticket mogul said he'd come to accept an unfortunate truth: that consumers accept luxury pricing in other realms, but not in ticketing. "Everyone knows you can't stay at the Four Seasons for the price you pay at a Days Inn," he said. "So why should a ticket be any different?"
He argues that old-fashioned supply and demand will determine the pricing of the LA28 tickets and customers should understand that. "A ticket is a commodity and no one pays more for a ticket than they want," said Rosen. "Floor seats cost more money than people pay to sit up in the nosebleeds. People consume content the way they can afford it. And you can watch these things at home on television. It's the ticketing business. It's not the ticketing fan club."
Couldn't LA28 put more tickets for sale at its minimum price of $28 to help lower-income people?
Rosen has watched enough big event sales to opine that many of those tickets will not put working-class fans in the stands, but simply allow buyers to resell them for huge profits in the after-market, which LA28 plans to open in 2027.
