As I wrote yesterday, I had hoped to beat the $30 face value price buying from ticket scalpers outside of the Soldier Field box office. However, the box office through me for a loop when we arrived and the cheapest ticket was now $60 – Soldier Field had doubled all the ticket prices for buying day of game at the box office. This gave the scalpers a tremendous advantage since they had a $60 price point to work with rather than $30. No scalper would accept under $50 per ticket since they knew that was still saving the fans $10 and the scalper’s tickets were in better locations.

We ended up paying $240 for 5 tickets that were a couple rows behind the south end zone goal. Face value on the tickets was $50 ($100 day of game) so we felt we still did better than if we had purchased the tickets ahead of time on ticketmaster.com. Even a $30 seat in the upper deck would end up costing in the upper $30’s with all the Ticketmaster fees.

The game was actually exciting (the last international club friendly I attended at Soldier Field was Manchester United vs. Bayern Munich in 2004. That match ended in a 0-0 draw). Barcelona won the match 5-2 with some great goals.

After the match, we ate dinner at the Weathermark Tavern (located at 1503 S. Michigan Ave.). Weathermark Tavern is our preferred summer hangout around Soldier Field. It has an outdoor patio to dine at if it is not too hot and a lot of room inside if it is. They have a Sunday special of $2.50 Miller Lites and $5 Bloody Mary’s which I’m not sure is the case when the Bears are home.