Ticket prices for the highly anticipated 4 Nations Face-Off Championship between Canada and the United States are rivaling those of the Super Bowl.
The upcoming hockey game marks the first time that NHL players from the two countries are battling each other for a title since the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver — and ticket prices for the Thursday evening match in Boston are surging as a result.
The cheapest ticket is hovering around $1,200, according to reseller TickPick. That’s roughly 450% more expensive than the initial price for a ticket when the in-season NHL tournament was first announced.
However, many tickets are spanning between $2,000 to $4,000, which is roughly the same price for some Super Bowl LIX tickets, which was met with muted demand from football fans this year. Ticket prices dropped even further on the day of the NFL championship and hovered around $2,000.
StubHub, another ticket reseller, told CNN that the tournament final is the best-selling NHL game of the season, even outselling two games of last year’s Stanley Cup Finals between the Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers.
4 Nations Face-Off is a new event from the NHL, which scrapped its annual All-Star game in favor of this heated exhibition. It’s the first best-on-best tournament to feature NHL players since 2016’s World Cup of Hockey and is giving fans a preview of next winter’s Olympics in Milan Cortina, where several NHL players will compete for the first time in more than a decade.
And it’s working: TV ratings have been through the roof for the inaugural edition, with Saturday’s match between the US and Canada garnering 10 million viewers across North America, according to the NHL. In the US alone, ESPN said the game was its “most-viewed non-Stanley Cup Final hockey telecast since 2019,” registering 4.4 million viewers.
Thursday’s final begins at 8 pm ET, airing on ESPN and streaming on ESPN+ and Disney+.
