Wisconsin football season ticket sales drop sharply ahead of 2026 season

MADISON – Wisconsin football fans appear to be voicing their dissatisfaction with their wallets ahead of the fourth season of the Luke Fickell era.

Wisconsin sold 47,587 season tickets for the 2026 football season, according to data obtained by the Journal Sentinel via an open records request. That is down 13.1% from UW’s 2025 season ticket total of 54,780.

The ticket sales number is as of Aug. 19 – less than three weeks before the start of the season and well after UW pivoted to selling single-game tickets. Season tickets still are listed on UW's ticket sales page, though, so the numbers could theoretically still rise slightly.

Standard tickets in the seating bowl were the biggest driver of the drop in sales, falling 18.1% from 38,084 in 2025 to 31,190 in 2026. Premium ticket sales dropped by 8.5%, and student ticket sales rose by 0.4%.

The sharp decrease follows the Fickell-led Badgers ’ 4-8 season in 2025 and 5-7 season in 2024. Those were UW’s first back-to-back losing seasons since the early 1990s. Season ticket sales dropped by 7.8% after the first of those losing seasons.

For how stark the dropoff in season tickets is, it also is not necessarily a surprise. UW averaged 66,820 tickets distributed per game in 2025, but only 49,063 of those tickets were scanned per game. That suggests an average of 17,757 no-shows per game.

Camp Randall Stadium officially has a capacity of 76,030, which includes attendees who do not need a ticket. UW’s only sellout in the 2025 season was against Iowa, which turned out to be a 37-0 loss and had 72,199 tickets distributed.

“The mix between season tickets and single-game tickets I do expect will shift,” said Adam Barnes, the athletic department’s chief financial officer, when presenting the 2026-27 budget in April . “And with that success on the field that we’re expecting, I do expect that we’ll exceed that.”

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin football season ticket sales drop sharply ahead of 2026 season