GUEST EDITORIAL: AEW has priced me and my sons out of attending more live events after sharp increase in prices since last year

All Elite Wrestling’s dwindling crowd sizes have been a major topic of discussion among wrestling fans, journalists, and podcasters in 2024. Unflattering photographs (usually of the hard camera side of the ring) often find their way online, and it isn’t uncommon for AEW to book a 10,000 seat venue and draw fewer than 4,000 and even 3,000 fans. Great wrestlers and exciting matches just aren’t enough to draw respectable crowds.

Let me first say this to the AEW faithful reading this column: I’m one of you. AEW is almost exclusively my promotion of choice. I’ve ordered every AEW pay-per-view with my oldest son. Dynamite is weekly destination programming for me, while Rampage and Collision are usually DVR shows. I don’t watch WWE.

There are several reasons for AEW’s small crowd sizes. For some, the easy answer is “Tony Khan’s booking,” whatever that means. In reality, factors include key talent being injured or leaving the company, a lack of overall buzz about AEW, and, yes, sometimes less than stellar creative.

But one of the biggest factors contributing to AEW’s inability to draw sizeable crowds is one that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough. Simply put, AEW ticket prices are too high. When potential ticket buyers go to AXS.com to try to score decent seats, they are often stunned to find ringside tickets in excess of $300.

AEW tickets haven’t always been this expensive. From December 2022 to September 2023, I attended three Dynamite shows in Colorado. I bought ringside seats during each respective pre-sale periods and paid the following ticket prices:

• December 28, 2022, in Broomfield (suburban Denver): $90 per ticket, row 3.
• June 7, 2023, in Colorado Springs: $104 per ticket, row 2.
• September 27, 2023, in Broomfield: $54 per ticket, row 1.

When I found out AEW was headed to Loveland in June 2024, I expected to get tickets during that pre-sale as well. But once I logged on, I was blown away to see that “AXS premium” ringside seats were $317.93 each before fees and service charges. These were first-purchase tickets; none of them were tickets bought up by scalpers for resale.

From June 7, 2023, in Colorado Springs to June 5, 2024, in Loveland, a single ringside ticket increased by $214 – that’s a 206 percent increase in one year. Like most people, when I buy tickets to a wrestling event, I’m not buying just one. My two twentysomething sons and I attended all three shows together. For us to attend the June 2024 show, we would have paid $953.78 for three tickets, before any fees.

According to Wrestlenomics, the AEW show at Blue FCU Arena in Loveland in June 2024 had 2,608 tickets distributed. For what it’s worth, that venue holds about 6,500 people. (In a completely unrelated note, on Halloween night in 2009, TNA drew about 250 people to the same venue. Ouch.)

AEW’s ringside tickets prices from Dynamite appear to be comparable across most markets. In addition, AXS seems to have a dynamic pricing structure when it comes to AEW ticket prices (and I’m assuming other live events). For the upcoming Collision show on October 26 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, second row ringside tickets were available for $157.25 as of October 1. A week earlier, those same tickets were around $199. Again, these are standard admission ticket prices, and not resale tickets. According to Wrestlenomics, 657 tickets for that show were distributed as of September 26, out of a possible 2,197. The capacity for that venue is around 9,000.

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For most AEW shows, tickets in the cheap seats drop pretty dramatically as the show goes closer. During the pre-sale for the June 5 show in Loveland, the cheapest seats were more than $50. By the day of the show, they had dropped to $15 per ticket, with bundles available even cheaper.

Several wrestling fans have suggested that would-be ticket buyers wait until the day of the show and tickets will be cheaper. But each time I’ve attended Dynamite, I’ve made the five- to six-hour drive from my home in Wyoming to Colorado . That means taking time off work, booking a hotel, and all the other planning that goes with it. How many potential ticket buyers have seen the initial price of $300+ and just said, “forget it?” How many casual or lapsed wrestling fans thought about checking out a local AEW Dynamite show, but decided against buying a ticket after seeing such high prices?

I don’t pretend to understand how ticket prices are set or venues are booked. I’m just a ticket-buying AEW fan who feels priced out of the most recent live event in my area. The logistics of how those ticket prices are determined are irrelevant to the average ticket buyer. AEW just isn’t a hot enough product right now to justify Dynamite and Collision ticket prices.

AEW’s exorbitant premium ticket prices seem like a self-imposed barrier to success. They’re not alone, as WWE has also jacked up ticket prices, but they’re selling them to eager audiences gobbling them up. I realize there is a cost to doing business, and then there’s inflation, greedflation, whatever you choose to call it. But a 206 percent increase in ticket prices in one year? Given AEW’s difficulty in drawing crowds for Dynamite and Rampage, it seems the better idea would be to make tickets accessible to the most ardent fans who are actively trying to give their money to Tony Khan’s company.

(Michael Moore is a writer living in Casper, Wyoming. He wrote a weekly wrestling collectibles column for the Pro Wrestling Torch from 2011 to 2021. He has contributed articles to publications such as Pro Wrestling Illustrated, Beckett sports publications, Tuff Stuff, and more. Follow him on Twitter @mmoorewriter or email him at michaelmoorewriter@gmail.com.)

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