Tickets for Winnipeg game not quite as hot as poutine

The Green Bay Packers play at the Baltimore Ravens on Thursday but quarterback Aaron Rodgers was looking forward to the following Thursday’s game.

“Definitely want to get out there in Winnipeg for our fans out there. That’d be a lot of fun,” Rodgers said last week.

At this point, the Green Bay Packers and Oakland Raiders will be playing in front of thousands of empty seats.

With incredibly overpriced tickets, at least half of the tickets for the game to be played in Winnipeg’s IG Field – capacity 33,134 – remain available. Tickets were originally priced between $75 to $340, not including taxes and fees. Last week, tickets priced at $164 were slashed to $75 by the game’s promoter. Still, preseason football north of the border seems about as popular as preseason football in the United States. Not even the once-in-a-lifetime chance to see Rodgers has blinded Canadian fans to the awful product that is NFL preseason football.

“If anything, it's a rejection of an overpriced cash grab in what was already a saturated market, with only so much disposable income to go around,” wrote Mike McIntyre of the Winnipeg Press. “It's worth noting a previous Canadian NFL experiment, in which Toronto hosted eight games between 2008 and 2013, saw prices slashed significantly once fans realized they were being played for suckers.

“It’s also worth noting you can find NFL exhibition game tickets for as cheap as US$12 available to see the Minnesota Vikings just a seven-hour drive south of here at beautiful U.S. Bank Stadium. In fact, a quick search around the league shows just how inflated these Winnipeg prices truly are.”