NFL Slashes Colts-Commanders London Ticket Prices From $325 to $105 After Sales Lag

The NFL has a ticket problem in London, and it's not the kind more marketing will fix.

Sunday's game between the Indianapolis Colts and Washington Commanders at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium kicks off the league's three-game London slate for the 2026 season. It's scheduled to also air at 9:30 a.m. ET on NFL Network, according to Newsweek. But instead of the usual instant sellout the NFL has come to expect overseas, the league has been quietly gutting its own prices for weeks.

The Numbers

According to Ken Maguire of the Associated Press, tickets that originally sold for up to £245 ($325) have been marked down to as low as £79 ($105), the lowest price tier the league offered anywhere in 2026. That includes some seats in premium sections that were never supposed to be discount inventory.

The cuts didn't happen all at once. Maguire reported that an upper-tier section priced at £185 ($245) dropped to £115 ($152) in late August before falling again to £79. The league is trying to avoid attendance at Tottenham slipping under 60,000 for the first time, according to Maguire's reporting, carried by Yahoo Sports, The Independent and the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

For context on what "first time" means here: Larry Brown Sports notes that both 2025 Tottenham games, Broncos-Jets and Rams-Jaguars, drew just over 61,000 fans, and the all-time high at that stadium was 61,273 back in 2023. A dip below 60,000 would be a genuine low point for a market the NFL has spent a decade cultivating.

Fans Who Paid Full Price Are Angry

Andy Burrows, a London native who Maguire's report describes as the NFL's 2025 international fan of the year for his support of the Commanders, called the pricing approach "a bit shambolic." He paid £235 ($312) for a lower-bowl seat near the 15-yard line during the summer presale. An empty seat near his sold this past week at the discounted price.

"They don't care about the fans," Burrows told the AP. "As long as that place sells out and it looks good on TV, the NFL won't care about us. And I'm not alone. I speak to fans every day."

Matt Cullen, a Jets fan in London, made a related but distinct point. He told the AP that the league has "priced me out" and cited what he called "team fatigue" with London fixtures. "I understand the clamor to sell out, but it also shows that it wasn't priced correctly in the first place," Cullen said.

The NFL set an initial price ceiling the market wouldn't bear, then discounted its way down in stages rather than admit it upfront. Anyone who paid the £245 ceiling price in the presale effectively subsidized latecomers now buying the same tier of seat for a third of the cost. The league also pushed tickets through UniDays, offering university students half-off deals, and emailed fans directly about the price cuts, per the AP's reporting.

The Independent noted that the NFL did not respond to a request for comment on the pricing strategy or the fan backlash.

Not Every London Game Is Struggling

Newsweek framed the soft demand as possibly rooted in the matchup itself, writing that "the lack in fanfare for Sunday's game may simply be due to the two teams taking part in the game not being all that popular overseas." That's a fair read given the numbers on the other side of the ledger: the Jaguars-Eagles game at the same stadium on October 11 sold out immediately, according to both Larry Brown Sports and the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, which credited the Eagles' popularity as the likely driver.

The AP's original reporting, by contrast, centers the story on fan anger over the pricing whiplash rather than on which teams are on the field. A less marketable matchup combined with a mispriced initial ticket tier is a worse combination than either problem alone.

The Bigger Picture

This isn't happening in a vacuum. The NFL has been aggressively expanding its international slate, with the Ravens and Cowboys already having played in Rio de Janeiro in Week 3, and the Rams and 49ers having played the league's first-ever game in Australia in Week 1, according to Larry Brown Sports. Games are also scheduled this season in Paris, Madrid and Munich, per the AP's reporting.

The London series wraps with Jaguars-Texans at Wembley Stadium on October 18, per NBC Sports. If that game also needs a last-minute discount to avoid an empty-seat problem, it will be hard for the league to keep calling this a blip. If it sells out on schedule, the Colts-Commanders slump looks more like a matchup problem than a strategy problem.

Either way, the fans who paid £245 in good faith during the summer presale already know the answer to the only question that matters to them: the NFL discounted the product out from under them, and nobody has offered them a refund.