Each and every year, the Super Bowl enthralls Americans. And 2013 will be no different. 24/7 Wall St. wanted to pull together some factoids about Super Bowl 47. The game will be a boon for New Orleans, but the raw dollars spent in the United States for the big game by the public, by teams and by companies come to an astronomical sum when you start to add them up.

24/7 Wall St. has looked at many figures to generate an idea of what things cost for the Super Bowl. We tracked the ticket prices for a physical seat at the game, the price of a TV commercial, the many millions of viewers, chicken wing and pizza consumption, beer consumption and more. We also have shown some basic figures for New Orleans on a local level to see what sort of expectations will be there for hotel rooms, restaurants and sports bars, energy use and so on. Another issue is the team economics, with team salaries and pay for the big game.

Raw Dollars for the Big Game

The lowest priced ticket on the Ticketmaster website was $2,387, and the highest priced ticket was $13,120. Those were per-ticket prices as of 2:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2013. Stubhub listed tickets starting at $2,119 per ticket. A check on the Ticketmaster site on Thursday, January 24, showed that the cheap tickets were now “only” $2,188 per seat. Regular football game seating at the Superdome accommodates roughly 69,700. Even just at the base price, and averaging the two lowest ticket prices as the norm, this comes to $2,253 for an average entry-level ticket. If all 69,700 seats averaged this, the tally comes to just over $157 million.

What about the Super Bowl 2013 TV commercials? Superbowl-ads.com shows that Super Bowl TV ads are selling for up to $3.8 million on average for the 30-second spots, but CBS reportedly is already sold out for the most part, and some ads sold for more than $4 million for 30-second spots. That average is up by $300,000 from the $3.5 million published rate for the 2012 Super Bowl, but we caution that the figure may change before the final game day. Advertisers were listed as follows: Anheuser-Busch, AXE, Best Buy, Cars.com, Century 21, Coca-Cola, Doritos, Fiat, Ford/Lincoln, GoDaddy.com, Hyundai, Kia, Kraft’s MiO, Mars, Mercedes-Benz, Milk Processor Education Program, Paramount, PepsiCo, Skechers, SodaStream, Taco Bell, Tide — Proctor & Gamble, Toyota, Volkswagen and Wonderful Pistachios. A more recent look shows some 31 advertisers, but some ads are longer and some are multiple ads. If we just take 35 ads, this comes to roughly $133 million spent by advertisers at the $3.8 million average. And again, some television ads supposedly sold for more than $4 million.

The Nielsen Company showed that the broadcast of Super Bowl XLVI on NBC had an average audience of 111.3 million viewers and was said to be the most-watched television program of all time. The game was viewed in roughly 53.3 million households, with a 47.8 U.S. household rating.

Food and Beer Trends

According to the National Chicken Council, Americans will eat some 1.23 billion chicken wings over Super Bowl weekend. This is projected to be down about 1% from a year ago, but the drop is due to prices impacting production rather than demand. Wholesale wings are currently at about $2.11 a pound (in the Northeast), the highest on record at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up 26 cents or 14% from a year earlier. The group cites Nielsen showing that fresh and prepared wings totaled $1.6 billion in sales for the 52 weeks ending Nov. 24, 2012, but its graph shows that wings are at record sales by more than 2:1, with almost 16 million chicken wings sold during Super Bowl 46 in 2012.

What about pizza? Super Bowl is the busiest day of the year for pizza sales, and figures from 2012 showed an expected 4 million pizzas being sold by restaurants alone. That is not counting the frozen pizzas from grocery stores nor the diehards who make their own pizzas from scratch. Statistic Brain said that Pizza Hut sold 2 million pizzas during the Super Bowl in 2012. Domino’s does not readily break out sales, but it shows that Super Bowl Sunday is the busiest of its top five pizza days, and that Domino’s delivery drivers will log about 4 million miles on Super Bowl Sunday. A report from Nation’s Restaurant News in 2012 showed that it is about 11 million slices, or 1.4 million whole pizzas.

Saveonbrew.com had an infographic for the 2013 Super Bowl showing the following: 50 million cases of beer will be consumed, resulting in more than 2 billion gallons of water used to flush away that much beer consumed, with roughly 7 million people calling in sick after the Super Bowl.

City Stats: San Francisco, Baltimore, New Orleans

The U.S. Census issued a report using the 2011 American Community Survey. Those living in San Francisco, ostensibly 49ers fans, had a median household income of $69,894 with a median home value of $719,800. Baltimore residents, ostensibly Ravens fans, had a median income of $38,721 and the median home value was $154,400.

These compare to national averages of $50,502 in median income and a median of $173,600 for owner-occupied homes. The averages in New Orleans are $35,041 in median household income and $185,400 in median home value of owner-occupied homes.

Local Stats for New Orleans

Super Bowl 47 will be the 10th Super Bowl held in the Big Easy, but this is the first time since Hurricane Katrina. The city’s “Katrina Mayor,” Ray Nagin, has been charged with 21 felony counts, including bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and filing false income tax returns. His arraignment was moved back from immediately before the Super Bowl weekend to February 20.

The Greater New Orleans Hotel & Lodging Association (NOHLA) reported that tourism officials project some 125,000 to 150,000 people will be in town for Super Bowl weekend, with 75,000 at the game and the rest in to be around the happenings. The association also said that it counts some 33,000 hotel rooms in the area, although we have seen larger figures than this in prior articles. A search on Hotels.com revealed as recently as Tuesday, Jan. 22, that the closest hotel not sold out had only one room left — in Chalmette, at $350 per night! An additional 214 hotels are listed as being NOT AVAILABLE from Feb. 2 to Feb. 4. The NOHLA said that the rooms have an average daily rate starting at $500 per night for three-star properties and $700 per night for four-star and five-star properties.

The New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau was quoted as saying that the Super Bowl will generate $300 million to $400 million in direct spending. The New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation said that the Super Bowl is expected to have a $432 million economic impact on the city. The Superdome has undergone $336 million in renovations since Katrina, followed closely by $300 million in improvements to Louis Armstrong International Airport.

Energy usage at the Superdome and at supporting facilities was listed as roughly 4,600 MW of electricity. The generation of this electricity will result in approximately 3.8 million pounds of CO2 emissions. Entergy Corp. said that it will donate carbon credits to offset or neutralize the impact of these emissions.

The NOHLA showed that round-trip airplane tickets from Baltimore were averaging about $800, and about $1,100 from San Francisco. Smaller boutique-style hotels that usually go for $300 to $500 a night during Mardi Gras are as high as $800 during the Super Bowl. Rooms at some major hotels are up to $2,000 a night.

Player and Finance Factoids

With the head coaches both being Harbaugh brothers, this is a first. The nicknames for Super Bowl 47 are already coming on strong: the Bros. Bowl, the Harbowl and the SuperBaugh.

The salaries for each team in 2012, according to Spotrac.com, include base salary, signing bonuses and other bonuses. This also includes active contracts, dead money, injured reserve and a cap rollover. The rounded cap figure for each team was listed as $130.9 million for the Ravens and $124.4 million for the 49ers. In 2012, the pay per player for the Super Bowl was a record $88,000 on the winning team and a record $44,000 of the losing team. That figure for a winning game is expected to rise to $92,000 next year and to reach $130,000 in the year 2020.

ESPN’s NFL site shows that the Ravens regular season offensive stats were 352.5 yards per game, versus 361.8 yards per game for the 49ers. The Ravens led in passing at 233.7 yards per game, versus 206.1 yards per game for the 49ers. The 49ers led in rushing yards at 155.7 yards per game, versus 118.8 yards for the Ravens. Defense is where the stats are wider: the Ravens allowed 350.9 yards per game, versus 294.4 yards per game for the 49ers.

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