The Super Bowl's Real Ticket Masters Gear Up for the Biggest Game

When Pope Benedict XVI came to Yankee Stadium in 2008 to say Mass, one of Ety Rybak’s clients wanted a front-row seat for one of his sisters, who happens to be a nun. There was no box office. The Church was distributing tickets through its dioceses and parishes. Selling access to the sacrament, it said, was a sin. But Rybak had a buyer, so he went looking for a seller. After a few calls he found the event organizer for the New York Yankees who controlled access. The answer was a polite no. Then Rybak called again for the next three months, sometimes several times a day, until he got a different answer. “Of course my client thinks that there was some secret,” he says, “like my brother-in-law is the pope or something, which is fine if he believes that.”

Rybak, 35, is co-founder of Inside Sports & Entertainment Group, a New York ticket brokerage. The company’s 25 employees make 20,000 sales per year totaling close to $45 million, a tiny but profitable sliver of the multibillion-dollar secondary ticket market. Its customers are bankers, lawyers, real estate brokers, and trust funders who want to be courtside for the Knicks, behind home plate for the Yankees, in the first row at the US Open finals, and backstage with the Rolling Stones.