Conor McGregor vs Floyd Mayweather: Tickets for super-fight struggling to sell with ‘thousands’ still available
Prices to attend the world's most expensive boxing match are starting at a staggering £2,665
IT'S supposed to be the hottest ticket in sports.
But fans aren't exactly storming the box office to buy tickets for Floyd Mayweather's mega-money scrap with Conor McGregor.
A check online Saturday revealed hundreds even thousands of seats are still available from Ticketmaster at the T-Mobile arena for the Aug 26 fight.
There are so many open seats that fans with enough room left on their credit cards can buy six tickets together in 162 different spots throughout the arena.
That might be because of the astronomical prices set by promoters.
The cheapest original tickets on Ticketmaster have a face value of £2,665. Or maybe fans are just waiting for the right time to buy, hoping the price will go down.
Either way, promoter Leonard Ellerbe isn't terribly concerned. He says the fight will not only sell out, but break records for the richest gate.
Ellerbe told The Associated Press: "We're very excited and very happy with ticket sales so far.
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"We're well on our way to smashing our own record which transcended the sport."
That record was a £54,974,873 gate set by Mayweather in his 2015 fight with Manny Pacquiao - three times bigger than any other boxing gate.
Still, five days after tickets first went on sale, seats throughout the arena are widely available. They are not, however, for anyone a little light in the wallet.
Tickets closer to the ring start around £7,600 whilst "platinum" seats that go for as much as £11,417.
The resale market is nearly as pricey. At Seatgeek.com the get-in price is around £1,500 for one of the few seats that originally sold at £380 and the median listing price is about £5,330.
The situation is much the same at StubHub, where demand for tickets is lower than it was at the same time before Mayweather's fight with Manny Pacquiao two years ago.
Johnna Hoff, a StubHub spokeswoman said: "We're not necessarily seeing demand levels for the fight yet.
"The encouraging part is people are buying some tickets."
A UFC spokeswoman did not return calls for comment. Ticketmaster replied to an email by saying it will "decline to comment at this time."
Any sign of slow ticket sales would undercut the argument by promoters that the fight might be the richest of all time, topping the Mayweather-Pacquiao bout that grossed some $600 million.
Promoters are also expecting huge pay-per-view sales at $99.95 apiece that could rival the 4.6 million sold for Mayweather-Pacquiao.
The demand for the fight is being driven largely by UFC fans, who tend to be younger than boxing fans and may not have pockets quite as deep.