The biggest game of the NFL season will be going down on Sunday night in Detroit and although the Lions will have home-field advantage, the Minnesota Vikings have decided to spend some serious money to take some of that advantage away.
Under NFL policy, the visiting team is generally given about 600 tickets to use for a road game, but the Vikings wanted to get more of their fans inside of Ford Field, so they decided to spend millions to buy more tickets on the secondary market. According to Sports Illustrated, the Vikings purchased roughly 1,900 tickets and each ticket cost them about $1,000, which means the team spent nearly $2 million for the extra tickets.
The Vikings then sent an email to their season-ticket holders to let them know that there were now extra tickets available. The team then ended up selling those tickets for much cheaper than what they paid (SI noted that some of the tickets were sold for just $200).
The Lions weren't aware of what was happening until they caught wind of an email that the Vikings had sent out to their season-ticket holders. As you can imagine, the Lions weren't thrilled with the situation and they even contacted the league office to see if Minnesota had violated any NFL rules, but that didn't go anywhere because the Vikings didn't do anything that was prohibited by the league.
Not only did the Vikings offer a few of the tickets to their season-ticket holders, but they also offered better tickets to team staff members along with player's families.
"Given the uniqueness of this game, we wanted to offer our stakeholders -- staff, family, season ticket members and team partners -- an opportunity to attend," team spokesman Jeff Anderson told SI in a statement.
The Vikings purchased most of their tickets behind the visitor's bench, which could be seen as s good strategic move, since it won't be as loud now that the team won't have to deal with as many Lions' fans.
The capacity of Ford Field is 65,000 and if you add the 600 tickets the Vikings were given to the 1,900 they bought, that means that Vikings fans will be taking up at least 3.8% of the stadium and that number will likely be much higher with many Vikings fans purchasing their own tickets for the game.
This has been a hot ticket and that's mostly because it's one of the biggest regular-season games in franchise history for both teams. The winner of Sunday's game will clinch the NFC North title and the No. 1 seed while the losing team will be forced to play on the road in the wild-card as the fifth-seed in the NFC.
