The New Way to Sell MLS Tickets Like a Pro (2024)

Welcome to the 2024 MLS Season

It’s an exciting time of the year for MLS fans, with the next World Cup and Leo Messi’s return to the States generating a lot of hype for soccer in North America. Coming off of an exciting 2023 season, it’s more apparent than ever that the MLS is on the rise. How does this impact how to sell MLS tickets?

Key Dates for the MLS Season

When does the MLS schedule come out?

MLS ticket resale for the 2024 season kicks off with the league’s schedule release, on December 20th, 2023.

When does the MLS season start?

The MLS season starts in February, with a standalone matchup between Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami CF vs. Real Salt Lake. Here are some of the other key dates to mark on your calendar this year:

• 02/21/24: MLS season begins
• 05/11/24: MLS Rivalry Week begins
• 07/04/24: El Tráfico at the Rose Bowl
• 07/13/24: Columbus Crew and LAFC, MLS Cup rematch
• 07/24/24: 2024 MLS All-Star Game
• 07/26/24: League’s Cup break begins
• 08/25/24: League’s Cup concludes
• 10/19/24: Regular season concludes

The Best Way to Sell MLS Tickets

List near Schedule Release Day.

• It’s a seller’s market.
• Early buyers will pay more.
• No impact from player injuries.
• Fan excitement peaks.

Most of your time should be spent on and around schedule release day. Try to plan out the games you plan to attend immediately and list everything else.

The MLS is doing all the work to make sure everything is exciting about the next season, so we recommend you catch the wave of volume before it slows down.

If you’re a season ticket holder, we go into more detail below.

How to Resell MLS Tickets on a Resale Marketplace

Look at Similar Seats

You can price check your MLS by finding listings that are:

1) Similar or closer in distance to midfield

2) Five rows behind you or closer to the field

If you have seats near the home bench, look at seats on the home side of the field. The same goes for visitor-side seats. Seats on the side of the field with the player’s benches carry a slight premium, so don’t compare those seats to seats on the other side of the field.

Find the cheapest seats that meet the above criteria, then price above or below based on the information below.

Bundle 3+ seats together and get a premium.

It’s harder to find three or more seats together relative to a pair, so buyers need to generally pay a premium of 10-15% for three seats together. If you can sell five or six seats, you might command as much as a 30% premium over a pair.  Buyers looking for that many seats typically plan ahead, which means buying when prices are higher in the life cycle of a ticket.

If you have three or more seats and can’t find comparable seats to price against, consider looking at a comparable pair of seats and pricing 15-30% above that pair.

Compare the Ticket Marketplace Prices

Ticketmaster, Stubhub, SeatGeek, and other marketplaces can have wildly different prices. Sometimes one marketplace doesn’t have much supply on hand, which can lead to prices that are unrealistically high.

The marketplace with the higher number of listings for your team is likely to be a better proxy of the true market value of the tickets.

The Factors that Impact MLS Ticket Prices

Watch out for these factors, and you will be able to predict the price direction of tickets with much greater accuracy. We sort out these factors into negatives and positives. The negative factors can drive the price down, so you should likely price your tickets lower preemptively to get a sale before further selling pressure kicks in. On the opposite side, the positives are great for the price.

Negatives:

• Selling within one month of the game. The closer the game, the lower the prices will be in general
• Home team is likely not going to the playoffs or underperforming expectations
• Key injuries to either the home team or the visiting team
• Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday games. Monday being the worst, Tuesday second worst
• Low-resale value opponents
  • Low-performing, minimal legacy, doesn’t draw well on the road
• Games that conflict with high-profile professional games (or Sundays during the NFL season)

Positives:

• Selling more than one month from the game. The further away from the game, the more you can sell your tickets for in general
• Home team is performing to or better than the expectation going into the season
• Opponent is performing to or better than the expectation going into the season
• Great resale value opponents
  • Either they are a legacy team, high profile conference opponent, have superstars (look at what Messi did for ticket prices last year), a deep fanbase, or are a championship contender
• Friday/Saturday/Sunday games (Saturday being the best)

How to Sell MLS Season Tickets

Guidelines for Season Ticket Holders: List MLS tickets close to schedule release day

Following this advice will help you maximize the price you can get for your tickets.

List your tickets as far out from the event as possible. On schedule release day, there will be significantly higher buyer volume which will allow for higher season ticket pricing. There will be plenty of die-hard fans or planners who want the certainty of having the tickets in hand, particularly for the hottest games of the year.

You’ll get a premium over the others who have tickets but haven’t gotten around to listing their tickets or are waiting until closer to the game when they know whether they can attend or not. That means at the schedule release, there’s extremely limited supply and very high demand, which leads to a seller’s market.

Additionally, you want to avoid negative factors that may come up and impact ticket pricing. For example, player injuries that happen on either the home team or the visiting team. Whether it’s a superstar that is injured or resting, that could reduce the value of the ticket in half or more.

If you are unable to list around the schedule release, we recommend selling at least five weeks in advance of the game. Why? Most sellers list one to four weeks before the game, so you’ll want to get out in front of these sellers before they flood the market with inventory.

Also, sellers start feeling the time crunch as the game nears, at which point it’s a race to the bottom as sellers undercut each other.

List early games and low-resale value opponents first

The earlier games typically see less hype, so you may want to consider listing these tickets lower than normal as these games have less buyer demand. If you know you are unlikely to attend these games, best to get out ahead of the falling prices and sell early.

Pay off your payment plan as soon as possible.

While a 0% interest payment plan seems great on the surface, you can’t list tickets that are not paid in full. Delaying reselling your listings can cost you significantly in the end via the lower resale prices that you are likely to encounter as the game nears.

The New Way to Manage MLS Season Tickets

As exciting as the MLS is right now, we know most season ticket holders can’t make it out to all the home games on the schedule. Selling tickets through resale marketplaces is often a necessity. That’s understandable – whether it’s weekday games that end too late at night, weekend commitments, or you need to resell the most valuable games to finance your season ticket investment.

Built for Sports Fans, By Sports Fans.

If you ever thought to yourself, “why do I spend so much time managing my tickets? Why isn’t there a solution for this?”

We thought the same thing, so we made TiqAssist.

Your tickets reach 100% of potential buyers through simultaneous listing on Ticketmaster, StubHub, Seatgeek, VividSeats, Gametime, TickPick, and other exchanges. No accidental double-selling of tickets. No marketplace sells more than 30% of our tickets, underscoring how important it is to list on all the top marketplaces.

Your ticket prices are automatically updated to sell for the highest price possible, and you get a bird’s eye view with a dashboard of all your ticket listings in one place.

Saving you a ton of time and earning you more with automatic pricing.

On top of all this, TiqAssist guarantees that your ticket will sell. So you can have complete peace of mind and never lose out on tickets.

Built for sports fans, by sports fans, we want you to spend less time on your tickets and more time enjoying the game along with us!

Summary

Reselling MLS tickets has become more challenging as more marketplaces flood the resale market. Your best shot at success is listing as far in advance as possible and following our pricing tips above.

These tips were written by our selling experts. Follow us on social media to get more up-to-date information and the latest tips to give you an edge when selling tickets.

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To learn more about best practices around ticket resale and the top ticket resale marketplaces, read our blog article on “How to resell tickets online.“

If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love having TiqAssist’s selling experts and technology fully manage your ticket resale for you. Just click “List” for any game on your personalized dashboard and you’re done!

Learn more about how to sell MLS season tickets for your favorite teams here.