The great 2028 Olympic ticket crashout, explained

Buying tickets to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is kind of like having a megawealthy friend talk to you about the hobbies that they enjoy. 

Do you fence? Do you like cricket? Badminton’s fun, right? 

Like a diabolically rich friend, the Olympics are also, at the same time, a test of financial responsibility. 

How much would you pay to watch people gracefully sword fight? Do you think you could learn to love cricket if you were spending $100? Would you like to go into mild credit card debt to see a less beautiful version of tennis?  

Ultimately, I said no to my rich friend, the Olympics. I wasn’t alone. 

As so many potential LA 2028 spectators have expressed, the entire ticket-buying process — email registration, a finicky website, specific time slots, opaque inventory — was bad. The fact that prices were exorbitant, as much as $5,000, after so many assurances from organizers and elected officials that these Games would be financially accessible, including $28 tickets available to locals, with nearly 50 percent of all tickets costing less than $200, and only 5 percent of tickets costing more than $1,000. 

I experienced the frustration of the terrible website, a bad time slot, and the sticker shock firsthand. I eventually logged off, empty-handed, during a spiral in which I found myself seriously considering spending money to see javelin, a sport I have never once thought about.  

Here’s how the great 2028 Olympic ticket mess went down.

Trust the process (or not) of buying 2028 Olympics tickets

The road to disappointment began this winter. 

On January 14, 2026, organizers opened registration for the first ticket drop, scheduled for April. Interested Olympic spectators were invited to submit their email addresses anytime until March 18, and residents of Los Angeles and Oklahoma City (softball and canoe slalom will take place there) had the opportunity to register for a locals-only presale. You were then entered into a random draw for a chance to purchase tickets, and those lucky enough to be selected were given a specific time slot between April 9 and April 19 to purchase tickets. Entrants living in LA and OKC who were selected were assigned a slot in a window that began a week earlier, on April 2. 

The tickets are categorized using an alphabetical tier system in which Tier A accounts for the most expensive tickets, Tier B is the second-most expensive, with prices decreasing all the way down to Tier J. It quickly gets confusing, though, because there’s no standard tier pricing across events — so the Tier A tickets for swimming will cost more (possibly thousands more) than the Tier A tickets for badminton. 

Here’s the other wrinkle: Not every event will have all the lettered tiers. In other words, some venues may only go down to D, while a bigger stadium or arena may go all the way to J. But since there’s no standard pricing, an E-tier ticket in a bigger venue could theoretically end up being more pricey than a C-tier — depending on the event. 

This is all difficult to visualize, especially since consumers can’t see the inventory of tickets available or the prices until they’re logged into the buying portal during their time slot. When you do have access, it’s presented as a giant list that you have to scroll through. And while you can see what the cheapest tickets are for the event you want to go to, you still have to click through to see the tiers. (As a workaround, the very helpful people on Olympics Reddit created a crowd-sourced spreadsheet detailing all the available sporting sessions, the tiers available for each, and the respective prices.) 

People living in LA — with the earliest time slots — didn’t seem to fare as well as organizers promised. On TikTok and in interviews with traditional media outlets, Angelenos said that they didn’t find the affordable tickets that were promised, and even though they had the early bird advantage, some found that some of the premier events, like gymnastics and swimming, weren’t available. If they were in stock, only the most expensive tiers were up for purchase. 

Meanwhile, organizers confirmed that no new inventory was added after the presale and before the first general sale began on April 9. A friend of mine who got an April 10 slot concurred that the options were slim and was tempted by a $1,116.27 entry to a preliminary swimming heat:

I ended up receiving what seemed to be one of the last spots, an April 17 window. And after everything I’d seen so far, my hopes were not high. If people were having trouble during the presale, getting into the fray two days before the entire drop closed was not looking promising. 

Right when my buying window unlocked, swimming and gymnastics were already sold out, as previous buyers also reported was the case. The same was true for men’s and women’s basketball. Tennis was blocked out as well. Football (soccer) was an option, but the only tickets I had access to buy were in Nashville. Nothing against Nashville, but I was looking to go to the LA Olympics in Los Angeles. 

The best team sporting event I had access to was Women’s Volleyball. The US team is the reigning silver medalists and won gold in 2020. It would be fun to see the American women mount their medal defense. 

I was very close to purchasing these, but ultimately decided against it. 

The problem is that the only tickets available to me started at $489.92 for tier A, the highest one for the event, and they were for a preliminary round match — the round-robin games before eliminations begin. There’s no guarantee, not even for that price, that I would be able to see the US team play; you’re spending nearly $500 for one match on a specific day, between two teams that have yet to be determined. However, if there were a cheaper option available for this, I would have jumped at it. 

There were some tickets available for track and field, but none for relays and sprints. Javelin, which was bundled with the men’s 3,000-meter steeplechase final, went for $750.38.  

The most affordable option I came across was tickets to see a preliminary round of women’s cricket for $105. While this would no doubt be a lucky day for a cricket enthusiast, I didn’t bite. While the price was right, I couldn’t be sure that my excitement for cricket in two years would be high enough to justify it. 

Finally, in an act of mild humiliation, I decided to click on tickets for the closing ceremonies. They were sold out, but I wanted to see just how expensive they had been. The most you could spend on the finale celebration was a cool $4,961.20. That’s nearly $5K not to see any sports. 

Is it normal for the Olympics to be too expensive for the people living in the host city?

The thing to keep in mind about the LA Olympics is that hosting the Games is, more often than not, a huge, expensive burden that strains security resources and stresses infrastructure. But because it’s the Olympics, many cities bid to host them anyway.  

Historically, the Olympics have a tendency to run over budget. The most recent Winter Games in Milan cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than expected, and according to France’s court of auditors, French taxpayers ended up shouldering a 6 billion euro burden after hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics (though organizers dispute this number). The French government initially said the public funding would only be 1 billion euros, and measures like using existing structures for the events (i.e., not spending money creating new permanent venues) would mitigate cost. 

“These events rarely end up being a great deal for the people who live in the cities where they’re staged,” said Brett House, a professor specializing in macroeconomics and international finance at Columbia Business School. House explained that the Olympics and similar events like the World Cup tend to have cost overruns and that organizations like the IOC and FIFA often put their priorities ahead of local needs (e.g., FIFA’s dispute with New Jersey and NJ Transit). Spending money on city infrastructure to accommodate the rush of people coming to the Olympics or any massive international event is a different animal than spending money on city infrastructure to actually improve the city long-term, and problems arise when the two don’t align. 

The big question now is whether the LA Olympics will also go over budget and who will end up paying. 

LA28, a privately funded nonprofit, is in charge of organizing these Games. Ticketing programs are one of LA28’s major revenue streams (along with licensing, corporate sponsors, and significant contributions from the International Olympic Committee), and according to LA28, the entire event will cost upwards of $7.1 billion. Selling pricey tickets helps pay for that budget.

But the city of Los Angeles, the state of California, and LA28 are still finalizing a safety net deal in which the city would step in and pay for the first $270 million in losses if there is a deficit. If the losses mount, the state would then step in and cover $270 million more. (According to LAist, lawmakers passed the legislation to enable this in 2017, but Gov. Gavin Newsom has yet to sign it.) LAist reports that “city officials say if that contract isn’t airtight, it could leave L.A. with millions in unexpected costs.”

Despite press releases and assurances from organizing committees like LA28 about the positive economic impact — jobs, contracts, tourism, etc. — history, and more recently Paris, suggests that LA taxpayers may end up footing some of the bill. Shutting those same taxpayers out of the events that they might end up paying for is a boorish look, and perhaps explains why organizers and city officials like LA Mayor Karen Bass have continually emphasized the importance of accessibility for LA residents. 

“It is very hard to quantify the benefits that organizers claim will accrue to cities,” House added.  “Of course, we can put numbers on some of the elements, but the numbers almost never come out as high as the organizers and the international organizations behind them promise that they will be.”

For unlucky fans who struck out on this first drop of tickets, there are some options: entrants who did not purchase tickets or were not selected will automatically be entered for a chance to buy tickets during future drops. The Olympics organizing committee said that the next drop will include “refreshed inventory” for the premier events that sold quickly during this one, but it is unclear what specific ticket inventory will be included in each future drop. The next drop will, according to LA28, occur in August. 

Consumers (myself included) are probably hoping that the second drop will have some more affordable tickets available. In a City Council meeting on April 14, members grilled LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover over ticket prices, the 24 percent service fee that applied to all purchases,  and financial transparency. Hoover and LA28 have promised that there will be more tickets — including more $28 tickets — available for locals in the future. But he also told LAist earlier this month that he wouldn’t be opposed to implementing dynamic pricing. 

Dynamic pricing is based on demand and timing — more interest means a more expensive ticket — and embracing it could mean prices for premier events get even higher. As an enjoyer of popular concerts and someone who uses Uber and Lyft, I don’t believe this approach has ever worked in my favor. 

That’s not all. 

Beginning next year, verified tickets will be available on three resale platforms: Ticketmaster, Sports Illustrated Tickets, and AXS/Eventim. The resale and secondary ticket market in the US can be very pricey, with tickets for popular events often going for a tremendous markup. As my colleague recently pointed out, reselling has become its own lucrative marketplace. While the 2026 Milan Cortina Games constrained the resale prices of tickets in its official app to face value (plus service fees), it’s unclear if that will be the case in LA.

If astronomical resale prices and dynamic pricing do go into effect, the Olympics will feel a lot like concerts and other sporting events in the US: extremely expensive, attended largely by people who can afford to spend $1,000 for a night out in the nosebleeds. 

But at the same time, I’m still registered for the next ticket drop (and future ones). I’m holding out the slightest hope that organizers might open up more inventory, and perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to see the next Simone Biles or Suni Lee in person, or watch Anthony Edwards and A’ja Wilson lead the US basketball teams to gold. More expensive resale is an option down the line, but if that doesn’t happen, I’ll have two years to befriend a diabolically rich person to take me along with them.