Starting with the New York Super Bowl in February, the average fan lucky enough to buy tickets in the annual lottery can forget about hawking them for a big profit — or any profit at all.
The NFL said Tuesday lottery winners will not be allowed to pick up their tickets until the day of Super Bowl XLVIII, and only after they already have entered MetLife Stadium.
Lottery winners will be barred from claiming their tickets and returning to the parking lot, where scalpers no doubt would have been waiting with fistfuls of cash for general-admission tickets with a planned face value of $500.
The 1,000-ticket lottery, which last year attracted 30,000 entries, will be limited this season mostly to season-ticket holders of the Giants and Jets. The winners will be announced in the fall.
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told The Post the league is cracking down on lottery winners “in an effort to ensure these fans actually go to the game and do not resell the tickets.”
McCarthy said the NFL had determined most lottery winners resold their tickets for as much as five times the face value.
Plans to throttle the quick-score hopes of lottery winners were unveiled on the same day the NFL confirmed internal talks that likely will lead to the league jacking the price of thousands of club tickets to the New York Super Bowl to record heights.
Though stressing a decision has not been made final, NFL officials did not deny a Wall Street Journal report Tuesday that roughly 9,000 club-level seats in the mezzanine with access to indoor restaurants could be priced as high as $2,600 each starting with the New York game.
That would be more than double the $1,250 cost of the highest-priced ticket to last season’s Super Bowl in New Orleans. It also marks the strongest sign yet the NFL has finally decided to take a seat alongside scalpers in exploiting the massive — and still growing — popularity of the sport’s signature event.
“We are looking to close the gap between the face value of the ticket and its true value as reflected on the secondary market,” McCarthy told The Post in an email Tuesday afternoon.
While the market for those top-of-the-line club seats is relatively small and limited to very deep pockets, the general public will be impacted by the NFL’s Super Bowl ticket overhaul, too.
Though the league is doubling the number of winners in its annual lottery to 1,000 from the usual 500 and cutting the cost of those seats to $500 from $650, the face value of most tickets will be going up significantly.
General admission tickets will have a face value of as much as $1,200 each after being sold for $950 in New Orleans, according to the NFL, and the best general admission seats will increase to $1,500 each after being priced at $1,250 and $950 at the Superdome.
The league also said it is dropping the face-value price of 30 percent of the general-admission tickets at MetLife to $800 for this season’s game (down from a high of $950 in New Orleans). McCarthy also said 40 percent of all general-admission seats would carry a face value of $1,000 or less.
But the league also admits it wants to start taking advantage of the true value of the game, as well as the novelty of holding it for the first time in the country’s richest and biggest city.
“The uniqueness of the Super Bowl in the New York/New Jersey area is also driving unprecedented demand and buzz,” McCarthy said.