If you’re looking to get a last-minute ticket to the Paris Olympics, you won’t find them on the popular ticketing services Ticketmaster, Vivid Seats, SeatGeek or any other provider. Ticket sales for the upcoming games have been consolidated into one French-based platform for direct sales and resales and one global platform for hospitality and ticket packages operated by On Location.
The ticketing platforms locked out say it’s no big deal. “When it comes to the Olympics, as the games are in Paris, we (SeatGeek) wouldn’t be offering tickets anyway as we are not the games’ primary ticket technology partner and our resale marketplace is only available in the U.S.,” said SeatGeek spokesman Cameron Papp in an email. Ticketmaster parent Live Nation declined to comment while Vivid Seats didn’t respond to a request for comment.
But there’s little doubt the ability to sell tickets to the Paris Games is a potentially sizable opportunity companies have missed out on. Three years ago, On Location won the rights to be the global hospitality provider for the Paris Olympics as well as the 2026 Winter Games in Milan and the subsequent Summer Games in Los Angeles. Giving the contract to one firm is part of the International Olympic Committee’s goal to tighten up ticketing for future games. Endeavor Group Holdings, the parent of On Location, told Wall Street via chief financial officer Jason Lublin in May 2023 that it anticipates “multiple nine-figure profit opportunities across the three Olympic Games.”
Much of that $100-million-plus profit opportunity for On Location comes not from the tickets themselves, but from the experiential add-ons it packages around the events it has access to. That includes €2,850 to watch the ceremony from a riverside café with drinks and €8,500 for a center court seat and lounge access at the men’s basketball finals. Add on more money—in some cases a lot more—for hotels and tours the company provides. To buy comparable Seine-bank opening ceremony seats through the Olympic Committee’s platform, the IOC asks for €2,700 and doesn’t list any tickets available for the men’s final.
Excluding the profit margins that come with hospitality, the ticket-selling opportunity appears significant. More than a decade ago, Ticketmaster had exclusive rights to sell tickets for the most comparable games to Paris, the 2012 London Olympics. Specific figures are hard to parse because Live Nation purchased Ticketmaster partway through the selling window and excluded Olympic revenue in its sales and income breakouts in financial reports. Still, for its 2012 earnings Live Nation reported an 18% jump in adjusted operating income from “exceptional” London ticket sales, the company said at the time. It then saw the lack of the Olympics the next year largely offset a strong year’s growth in all its other sports and concerting ticket sales.
Missing out on the Olympics also probably pinches efforts to expand internationally by Live Nation and Vivid, the two largest publicly traded ticketing businesses. Live Nation says it sees 70% of new tickets now sold outside the U.S.—about half of that from Europe, the company said in May. Vivid, meanwhile, accelerated a planned expansion with an eye toward offering service internationally later this year, though it sees non-U.S. growth as driven mainly by concerts and theater, rather than sports.
The companies don’t claim any impact from the lack of Olympics business. Vivid expects to produce about $825 million in revenue this year, according to the midpoint of guidance given to analysts, a jump of 16% over last year. Sports accounts for 40% of the gross value of tickets it sells, with the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, soccer, college football and basketball its main sports areas, none of which account for more than high-single-digit percentage of gross sales. Women’s sports, pro wrestling and UFC are showing strong momentum this year, according to Vivid.
Wall Street expects Live Nation revenue to rise 8% this year to $24.7 billion, thanks in large part to double-digit sales in U.S. and foreign concert festivals the company runs. Still, sports do offer some growth opportunities, such as evolving Ticketmaster to generate more sports-related sales to fans as they buy tickets. “You’re going into the playoff game in here tomorrow night. You’re taking your kids. So do you want to get a jersey with that and have that delivered same day so that they can wear their favorite player’s jersey?” said Live Nation chief financial officer Joe Berchtold at a May J.P. Morgan conference.
Sounds great, just not for the Olympics.
