Buying tickets for Bills vs. Jaguars in London absolute nightmare

The 2023 NFL London Games appears to be a very hot ticket. It seems no matter how swift Bills Mafia were to queue up on Thursday, June 22 for a chance to purchase tickets to the Buffalo Bills’ “home” game against the Jacksonville Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, patience was the preferred play. That’s especially true when faced with a Ticketmaster system that clearly had dibs on anointing itself the problem in the equation.

With a virtual line that stretched more than 400,000 IP address requests deep, there were certain to be issues. The number of disappointed fans is sure to outnumber those who successfully secured seats. That’s because Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has 62,850 seats available for NFL games. Needless to say, anyone near or well into the six figures of today’s queue was staring at bleak odds of securing tickets.

If you’ve ever waited in one of these online queues for limited-quantity goods, you likely understand how frustrating the experience often is, from wait times to crashing pages. But what Bills Mafia and others experienced was on another level of frustrating. A certain degree of disappointment is expected when trying for something that’s not available as “made to order.” Most people understand that, and the nature of high-demand events. But it’s fair to wonder if anyone ever expects to be in a line 400,000 deep.

Buffalo Rumblings’ own Sara Larson logged in at 6:55 a.m. this morning, and found herself deep in the back of the queue:

Among our team, Sara wasn’t the only one left looking at a line fit for an end-of-days scenario. This screenshot shows a wait that’s almost half as long as Sara’s above, yet still almost 181,000 deep. Scant odds of success to be found by either wait.

A grain or several of salt is always wise when digesting anything on social media, but there were quite a few unhappy people tweeting about their experience. Some claim the fiasco was the work of “ticket bots,” which are algorithms that game e-commerce pages to gain preferred access to inventory above all others. Many have said that they’ve yet to discover a season ticket holder who procured seats to the Week 5 international game. As such, those who still want to go to the game will likely have to pay highly inflated prices following today’s on-sale.

It’s perhaps foolish to expect anything different from a ticket system that’s long aggravated people trying to purchase seats to some of the world’s most exclusive events. Instead of Madonna/Michael Jackson/The Boss, or Taylor Swift/Ed Sheeran/Kendrick Lamar, this time it’s the Buffalo Bills.

Now, a fair number Bills Mafia must endure the headaches that accompany trying to find tickets on the secondary market. This isn’t the first time Bills fans have found it difficult buying seats to a game, but that doesn’t change peoples’ frustration with a process that seems resistant to any significant change in process.

Did you try to score tickets for Bills vs. Jaguars? If so, share you experience below!