Tickets for Sunday night's Vikings game against the Green Bay Packers are white hot, so the team is warning fans to be careful trying to buy them.
Combine the regular-season debut of the $1.1 billion U.S. Bank Stadium with the arrival of the team Vikings fans love to hate and the game climbs to the status of a major event.
As of Tuesday, the average resale value of tickets to Sunday's game was $447, surpassed only by the resale price of tickets to the 2014 Major League Baseball's All-Star Game at Target Field, according to an analyst at seatgeek.com, which tracks Minnesota events.
Because of the high interest, buyers should be especially cautious about counterfeit tickets on the secondary market. The 66,200-seat stadium has been officially sold out for the entire season for weeks.
Only three outlets are authorized resellers of Vikings' tickets: the team's ticket office, the NFL Ticket Exchange and Ticketmaster. "Any other source, you're doing it at your own risk," team spokesman Jeff Anderson said.
Fans should not purchase the old-school paper tickets that they've had in the past. They're no good. Only digital tickets and printed 8.5-by-11 PDFs are accepted for games at the new stadium.
"If a fan encounters a hard ticket on the street, it's a counterfeit," Anderson said.
Although the team generally issues counterfeit ticket warnings for home games against the Packers, prices for this year's game blow away any Twin Cities football game in years. It's also the third most expensive ticket across all 32 teams in the 15 remaining regular weeks of NFL football, behind only two New England Patriots home games, according to analysis by Chris Leyden at seatgeek.com.