If the average taxpayer wants to attend the Super Bowl, he or she will have to choose between a ticket and eating for the year.

You don’t need us telling you that the Super Bowl isn’t for the average person, but you might have to explain to us why those average taxpayers have to fund Super Bowl host sites. According to ticket resale site TiqIQ, the current average list price for Super Bowl 50 is $6,007.74. Median household income in 2014 was $53,657.

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That’s a luxury, to be sure, but it’s also just below what that average consumer spends for food each year ($6,759) and is more than they’d spend on insurance ($5,726) or health care ($4,290). It’s also a steep discount from the cost of a ticket for last year’s Super Bowl ($9,722.86). As we’ve mentioned before, taxpayers have shelled out an average of $250 million for 21 NFL stadiums since 1997. The host city for this year’s Super Bowl — Santa Clara, Calif. — is on the hook for $114 million of the cost of building Levi’s Stadium for the San Francisco 49ers, but could have to pay up to $933 million more of the stadium’s $1.3 billion costs if the city’s stadium authority isn’t able to make up the difference through events and sponsorships.

A history of NFL team moves

The overwhelming majority of these same taxpayers will never see the inside of a Super Bowl suite, which is available for as much as $544,000, or sit in Section 116 Row 4, which is currently selling for more than $26,100. Though 48% of tickets being sold for this game are going to buyers in California, they’re being sold for prices that have escalated significantly within the last decade, from an average of $2,329 for Saints-Colts in 2010 to $2,567 for the Seahawks and Broncos in 2014. Granted, the matchup boosts the price considerably (as was the case for the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers in 2011, when the average ticket cost $3,649.

Meanwhile, the amount that the average consumer spends on housing alone each year jumped from $16,887 in 2012 to $17,798 by 2014. The amount paid for health insurance during that span jumped by an average of $800, while average expenditure in general swelled by $2,000. With consumers already feeling the squeeze, paying out that much to a league whose average ticket price ($85.83) is already tops among major sports and whose cost of taking a family of four out to a game and getting food, souvenirs and parking adds up to more than $500, according to Team Marketing Report, just isn’t realistic.

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Especially when there’s this kind of travel involved. About 24% of fans are coming in from the Denver Broncos’ home state of Colorado, with another 11% following the Panthers from North Carolina. According to Priceline.com, the cheapest round-trip flight from Denver to San Jose is currently $300 and the cheapest flight from Charlotte is $412. That doesn’t even include the cheapest hotel room in Silicon Valley, at $216. All together, the total price for the cheapest ticket to the game ($3,279), round trip flight, and three nights at a hotel is $4,227 from Denver and $4,339 from Charlotte.

We’ve already reached a place where, if a team ever wants to host a Super Bowl, it has to sacrifice a home game to play in London and has to agree to a lengthy, list of costly NFL demands. However, by limiting the availability of tickets beyond league sponsors and partners to a level that makes them not even aspirational, but unattainable for the common fan, the NFL has separated the Super Bowl from its fans entirely. It not only gives them no motivation to ever seek out a ticket for the game, but it actually incentivizes staying home as NFL attendance dropped by more than 2 million fans in three years.

While that’s great news for Super Bowl advertisers, who’ve spent $2.38 billion on the big game since 2006 according to Kantar Media, it’s just putting another layer between local franchises and fans who want increasingly less to do with them. That’s great for building short-term ratings success, but not for breeding long-term customer loyalty.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.