Higher Lakers Ticket Prices Beat Paying a Scalper's Markup

A pitch to investors puts the average Lakers ticket at $361 within two years, up from $217.

The average Lakers ticket could climb from $217 to $361 within two years if the incoming owners push resale brokers out of the market. The projection sits in documents prepared for potential investors, reported by the Wall Street Journal on September 18, 2026 and covered the same day by the Los Angeles Times. My position: that's the honest price, and the scalper's price was never a discount.

Picture the fan this is supposed to hurt. A couple buys two upper-bowl seats for a Tuesday game off a resale app, and they're already paying roughly two hundred dollars for a hundred-dollar seat. The only live question is who keeps the difference: the club that runs the building and the team, or a broker whose entire contribution to the evening is a transferable barcode.

That arithmetic isn't mine. The Times lays out the same math: sell a $100 ticket to a broker who flips it at $200, or skip the broker, sell it at $200 yourself and bank the spread. The $200 exists either way. It has existed for years.

The receipts sit in the same report. The Lakers played to 99.8% of capacity last season, per ESPN, so you can't argue face prices were choking off demand. The Dodgers ran this play a decade ago and lead the majors in attendance, on pace to sell 4 million tickets for a second straight season. The Dodgers comparison tells you the model works at scale. This isn't a Kushner invention either: in February, under Mark Walter's ownership, the Lakers already announced sizable increases for the 2026-27 season.

Here's where my read shifted while working through it. Dynamic pricing takes something real from one group of buyers. Cheap seats stop falling, because a club running its own inventory would rather eat a few empties than teach its customers to wait for a markdown. The fan who loses is the one who used to catch a February weeknight below face from a broker who'd guessed wrong. That's a genuine loss, it's narrow, and it's the thing I'd hold the new owners to.

The pushback I take seriously

Season-ticket holders will say the resale upside is what made renewal affordable — the popular games paid for the ones they skipped. True, and it was a subsidy the club never promised, funded by whoever bought the marked-up seat. Losing an unpromised subsidy isn't a broken deal.

The second objection I simply concede. Nothing obliges the Lakers to spend a dollar of the captured markup on anything a ticket buyer can feel. The investor pitch projects close to $600 million in annual profit by 2037, and a franchise worth $30 billion by then. Joshua Kushner, whose sports company Thrive Eternal is making the pitch, and former Disney chief executive Bob Iger agreed in August 2026 to buy control at a $12.5-billion valuation. None of those numbers are about your legroom.

Two calibrations, because the heat belongs in the take and not in the facts. The $361 figure was meant to show investors how much incremental revenue is sitting with the brokers, not to signal an imminent hike, a person familiar with the deal told the Times. And the paper hasn't seen those investor documents — this argument runs on what the Times and the Journal reported.

One more receipt, from the Times' own owner: Patrick Soon-Shiong holds 4% of the Lakers and isn't selling, his attorney told the paper, partly because "we believe they are still undervalued."

Thrive Eternal declined to comment, citing the pending league approval, the Times reported. The NBA hasn't approved the sale. When the 2026-27 price sheet is in front of you, the number to watch isn't the face price. It's whether a resale seat still costs more than the box office.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 19, 2026.