The outrage machine is in full gear. Open any comment section or "Letters to the Editor" page, and you’ll find the same tired sob stories. Fans are "heartbroken." Families are "priced out." The ticket-buying process for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is being labeled a "horror show."
It’s all noise. Worse, it’s economically illiterate noise.
The public loves to play the victim when it comes to high-demand events, but the reality is simpler and far more cold-blooded: there is no such thing as an "unfair" price for a luxury good. The Olympics are not a human right. They are a finite, high-velocity asset. If you can't get a ticket, it’s not because the system is broken. It’s because the system is finally working to find the true market value of a seat.
We need to stop pretending that "first-come, first-served" is a moral victory. It’s just a different form of discrimination—one that favors people with the fastest internet connections and the most free time to sit in a digital queue.
The Myth of the "Real Fan"
The most common grievance in these "horror stories" is that tickets are being snatched up by bots and resellers instead of "real fans." This logic is flawed. A "real fan" is someone who values the experience. In a capitalist framework, value is measured by what you are willing to sacrifice to obtain something.
If a reseller buys a ticket for $200 and flips it for $1,200, and someone buys it at that price, the market has spoken. The person who paid $1,200 is, by definition, the person who wanted it most. They put their capital on the line. The person complaining that they couldn’t get it for the face value of $200 didn't want the ticket; they wanted a subsidy.
I’ve seen organizers blow millions trying to "protect" fans with closed-loop systems, non-transferable IDs, and lottery systems. All it does is create a massive shadow market where the risk—and therefore the price—increases. When you fight the secondary market, you aren't helping the fans. You are just making the "horror stories" more expensive to write.
Why Scalpers are Necessary Evils
Let’s talk about the bogeyman: the professional reseller.
In any other industry, we call this "arbitrage," and we celebrate it. We call it "liquidity." If a stock is undervalued, traders buy it until the price reflects reality. If a house is underpriced, a flipper renovates and sells it. But when it comes to sports, we expect the laws of supply and demand to vanish because of "spirit" and "tradition."
Scalpers provide a vital service: they assume the risk. If the LA28 games are a logistical mess or if a major star pulls out of the track and field events, the people holding the inventory are the ones who lose. By scooping up tickets early, they provide the organizers with immediate cash flow and guaranteed sell-outs.
If you want a ticket at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday three years before the event, the secondary market is the only reason that’s possible. They provide a 24/7 global marketplace. Without them, you’re stuck praying to a glitchy Ticketmaster algorithm during a three-minute window on a random Wednesday.
The Fraud of "Face Value"
The real villain in the LA28 ticket saga isn't the guy in a hoodie running a bot farm. It’s the organizers who set "face value" prices artificially low to maintain good PR.
When the Organizing Committee sets a price of $150 for a high-demand final, they aren't being "fair." They are creating a massive gap between the price and the value. That gap is a magnet for arbitrage. If the committee actually wanted to stop scalping, they would use Dutch auctions.
Imagine a scenario where the opening price for a gold-medal basketball game starts at $5,000 and drops by $100 every hour until every seat is filled.
- The "whales" pay the premium.
- The money goes directly to the Olympic committee (and theoretically the athletes or the city).
- The "horror story" of the secondary market vanishes because there is no profit margin left for the flippers.
But they won’t do that. They want the "affordable" optics while knowing full well that 40% of those seats will end up on the secondary market anyway. They outsource the "greed" to the resellers so they can keep their hands clean while still reaping the benefits of a sold-out stadium.
The Logistics of the "Horror"
The complaints about "glitches" and "queues" are mostly a result of people refusing to accept the math. There are roughly 10 million tickets for LA28. There are billions of people on earth. Even if only 1% of the world wants to go, that’s 80 million people fighting for 10 million spots.
You aren't experiencing a "glitch." You are experiencing a 1-in-8 chance.
The friction in the buying process is actually a feature, not a bug. It acts as a barrier to entry. If the site worked perfectly and everyone could checkout in ten seconds, the tickets would be gone in five minutes instead of five hours. The "horror" is just the physical manifestation of extreme scarcity.
The High Cost of "Accessibility"
Every time a politician or a columnist demands "price caps" or "more accessible seating," they are asking to ruin the event.
Lowering prices doesn't increase the number of seats. It only increases the number of people who are disappointed when they can't get one. If you have 50,000 seats and 500,000 people who want them, 450,000 people are going to be unhappy regardless of whether the ticket costs $10 or $1,000.
At $1,000, the unhappiness is distributed based on wealth.
At $10, the unhappiness is distributed based on who has the best bot or the luckiest click.
The former is a functioning economy. The latter is a lottery that rewards tech-savviness over actual desire to attend the event.
Stop Chasing the Ghost of 1984
Los Angeles likes to brag about the 1984 Olympics. They call it the "model" for how the games should be run because it made a profit. But 1984 was a different universe. We didn't have a globalized secondary market. We didn't have instant communication.
In 2028, the Olympics are a luxury fashion brand. They are the "Hermès Birkin" of sports. You don't walk into a boutique and complain that a handbag costs $15,000 and has a three-year waitlist. You understand that the price and the exclusivity are the point.
The "horror" of LA28 isn't that tickets are hard to get. The horror is the entitlement of the middle-class fan who thinks they deserve a front-row seat to a global spectacle for the price of a dinner at Chili’s.
The Actionable Truth
If you actually want to be at the 2028 Games, stop waiting for the "official" release. Stop refreshing the "Letter to the Editor" sections. And for the love of God, stop expecting the Organizing Committee to save you.
- Budget for the Secondary Market: Expect to pay 3x to 5x the "face value." If you can't afford that, you can't afford the Olympics. Accept it now and save yourself the stress.
- Target the "Boring" Sports: Everyone wants the 100m sprint and the Gymnastics finals. Nobody is scalping tickets for Modern Pentathlon or Archery. If you want the "Olympic Experience," go watch someone shoot an arrow.
- Wait Until the Last Minute: The secondary market is a game of chicken. Prices often crater 48 hours before an event when resellers panic about holding "dead" inventory. The "horror stories" come from people who bought in the peak hype cycle.
The market isn't broken. Your expectations are.
The 2028 Olympics will be a playground for the global elite and the exceptionally lucky. That is the nature of a limited-resource event in a globalized world. You can spend the next four years writing letters about how "unfair" it is, or you can start saving your money.
The scalper isn't your enemy. He's the only one telling you what the tickets are actually worth. Pay the man and enjoy the show. Or stay home and watch it in 4K for the cost of a streaming subscription. That’s the most "accessible" the Games have ever been.
