The NFL doesn’t want Denver Broncos season-ticket holders to know how many seats to the Super Bowl it gave the team, but the number was “extremely limited” and less than fans realize.

Angry Broncos fans have been calling and writing the Broncos, as well as The Denver Post and talk radio shows, to complain about the lack of transparency.

“What this really comes down to is that they are driven by profits, and selling the tickets to their suite owners, the advertisers and travel package companies, they can make more money,” said Tim Hoops, a Broncos season-ticket holder since 1967 who has not won any of the seven Super Bowl lotteries since then.

The league says the Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks each got 17.5 percent of tickets to the game, but what the NFL will not say is 17.5 percent out of how many.

And the answer is not 82,566 seats, the capacity of MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, Broncos and NFL sources said.

“I can’t give you an exact number,” said Corry Rush, an NFL spokesman.

Nor will the Broncos say how many tickets the organization received.

“We received an extremely limited inventory of tickets from the NFL, and those were made available to our season-ticket holders and the general public in a manner that met all league guidelines,” said Broncos spokesman Patrick Smyth.

The number is controversial because the Broncos and the Seahawks sold an undisclosed portion of the tickets they received from the NFL to a company called PrimeSport, which is offering the seats as part of vacation packages that include airfare and hotel stays.

“We certainly wish every Broncos season-ticket holder and fan had an opportunity to purchase Super Bowl tickets, but the amount of tickets allocated by the league was so limited that unfortunately we were unable to do that,” Smyth said.

The Seattle Seahawks also aren’t saying how many tickets they offered to season-ticket holders and how many they sold to Prime-Sport. The Seahawks did not return several calls from The Denver Post.

Broncos season-ticket holder Gary Cranston is among many who want answers.

“The price we pay for regular seats, and especially the club level, I think we deserve transparency,” said Cranston, who didn’t win the ticket lottery for any of the last three Super Bowls the Broncos played.

“What is the distribution of the allocated tickets? Season-ticket holders, the team, travel company, corporate sponsors, etc. I think we have the right to know this.”

The NFL distributes its tickets at face value according to this breakdown: Seventy-five percent go to the teams, including 17.5 percent each to the two teams playing in the Super Bowl. The host teams — the New York Jets and the New York Giants — share 6.2 percent of tickets. The remaining teams get 1.2 percent each, comprising 33.6 percent.

The league retains 25.2 percent of tickets for corporate sponsors and media.

It would appear the Broncos, receiving a 17.5 percent share of the stadium’s seating, would get about 14,500 tickets from the NFL. But league spokesmen said that number is not accurate and that they could not reveal the total number of seats.

“The Super Bowl is one of the world’s most popular events, and we would like for as many fans as possible to attend,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said. “We can never fulfill all the requests for tickets. The NFL’s Super Bowl ticket distribution process has been in existence for years and is well documented. We are confident it is in compliance with all applicable laws.”

It’s unclear whether the number of tickets sold by teams to brokers such as PrimeSport has changed in recent years.

Worst of the seats Broncos season-ticket holder Ken Heller was one of the lucky ones who won the lottery and a chance to buy two Super Bowl tickets at face value, for a total of $1,700.

But Heller, who has had season tickets since the 1960s, was disappointed to find out his seats were in a far corner of the stadium, in the upper deck about 10 rows from the top.

Several others who won the lottery said the same, wondering whether the Broncos gave the worst of the seats the team received to fans and sold better seats to PrimeSport, which turned around and sold those seats as part of packaged vacations. It seemed “the seats that were allocated to season-ticket holders were those no one would accept as part of the package,” Heller said.

Broncos’ spokesman Smyth said he could not confirm whether season-ticket holders received seats in the far corners of the stadium.

The Broncos organization was trying to manage growing fan discontentment.

“Our fan support has been absolutely extraordinary, and we’d like nothing more than a stadium filled with orange on Super Bowl Sunday,” Smyth said. “But this is a league game, and we receive a very limited allotment of tickets to distribute to our fans.”

It isn’t just Broncos fans who are annoyed by the lack of tickets sold directly to the public. In New Jersey, one football fan has sued the NFL after paying $2,000 apiece for two tickets to Sunday’s game.

The NFL, according to the class-action lawsuit, is violating New Jersey’s anti-ticket-scalping law, part of the state’s Consumer Fraud Act, because it sells just 1 percent of Super Bowl tickets directly to the public through its lottery system. The remaining fans are forced “into a secondary market for the tickets where they must pay substantially more than the ticket’s face value to attend one of the most popular and iconic sporting events of the year,” says the lawsuit filed by the Nagel Rice law firm.

New Jersey law prohibits withholding more than 5 percent of tickets to an event from sale to the public.

Of the tickets the NFL disperses to teams, many are resold by the teams to brokers that “grossly inflate the price and then repackage the tickets into costly packages,” the lawsuit says.

The NFL denied fan Josh Finkelman’s claims.

“We strongly disagree with the plaintiff’s interpretation of the N.J. Consumer Fraud Act and his claims, which we do not believe are supported by law or the plain language of the statute at issue,” the NFL’s McCar-thy said.

Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593, jenbrown@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jbrowndpost