Season-ticket holder Peter Hart says he hasn’t sold any of his seats for the Portland Hearts of Pine men’s professional soccer games during the club’s inaugural season.

“But I might have to start rethinking this,” the Portland resident joked. “Our daughter is getting married. I might need that money.”

Hart and the roughly 4,000 season-ticket holders have seats that are routinely selling for five times their face value on the secondary market — sometimes even 10 times or more.

The high resale cost is a function of supply and demand. Every Hearts of Pine home game sold out months ago and the club will set a USL League One average attendance record (current average is 5,740). That leaves a very slim supply of tickets for a game at 5,500-seat Fitzpatrick Stadium.

The 4,000-person season-ticket waiting list indicates there is plenty of demand and that it’s unlikely to slip dramatically in the Hearts’ second season.

Most of the season-ticket holders are holding onto their seats, said club executives.

Hart and his wife, Heather, bought their tickets along with three other couples. The group had become friends while watching their children play club and high school soccer. Peter Hart said they’re having so much fun at Hearts games, they want to go to every one. When they haven’t been able to attend, they’ve passed on the tickets to friends or relatives.

“We’re like everybody’s favorite cousin or uncle because the Hearts of Pine are so popular,” Hart said.

“It’s just become the place to be because it’s a feel-good, food-drink-Maine-Portland thing. It’s so cool.”

Hart did buy two additional tickets on the secondary market — for about $85 a seat — because he wanted his own children to attend a game.

Stubhub is the Hearts of Pine’s official ticket resale market. On Thursday morning, 24 tickets were available for purchase for the game against Westchester SC on Saturday, when Portland will try to snap a three-game losing streak and clinch a USL League One playoff berth.

Prices including fees, ranged from $90 for a seat in section 112 ($12 season-ticket face value) to $223 for a midfield seatback chair ($38 face value). One seat in Section 109, another $12 face-value ticket, was also priced at $223.

Hearts of Pine President Kevin Schohl said the club tracks ticket resales but has no control over the secondary price nor reselling behavior, short of not allowing a season-ticket renewal if it’s apparent the tickets were purchased for the purpose of reselling at a profit.

“We’ve only had two instances where there were fans who were exhibiting ticket-broker behavior,” Schohl said. “We can’t block it but we can see it. We have told our season-ticket holders they shouldn’t be doing it for the purpose of resale.”

Schohl said there’s a sense of pride within the club that the vast majority of season tickets are being used by their original purchasers.

“There are thousands at this game who are holding this asset and they are there,” Schohl said. “These are some of the hottest tickets in town and there are so few tickets on the secondary platform and market forces have their way.”

For the first time this season the club put an extra 500 standing-room-only tickets on the market for Tuesday’s home game against Spokane Velocity. They sold out in less than five minutes.

Hearts of Pine captain Mikey Lopez has played professional soccer for 13 seasons, with stints in the top-tier MLS, second-tier USL Championship, and now with the third-tier Hearts. Lopez called the high resale value for Hearts tickets, “a crazy, crazy thing that I haven’t really seen much in my career.”

Lopez said the one downside is that the high cost of tickets on the secondary market “could price a lot of people out” of being able to attend the game.

Season-ticket holder Alex Urquhart, 39, of Portland said he was worried the inflated secondary market might lead the club to an extreme price hike for year two. Urquhart said he’s not sold any of his tickets on Stubhub or another resale vendor but he did buy an extra ticket for $60.

“My season tickets cost $207 last year. I figured that they would jack the prices up (for next season) and ruin it and they didn’t do that,” Urquhart said.

In June, the Hearts announced their 2026 season-ticket prices, with a per-game increase of $1 to $3.

Eight complaints about secondary market Hearts of Pine tickets have been brought to the office of Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey since mid-June, the Bangor Daily News reported. The story said that the AG’s office would not provide information about the specific nature of the complaints but that five related to ticket sales on Stubhub.

In June, Maine enacted a first-in-the-nation consumer protection law to limit excessive fees and misrepresentation of the total price in the sale and resale of tickets. A key provision is that service fees charged by a ticketing agency cannot be greater than 10% of the original total price of a ticket.

What the law does not prohibit is how much of a markup a ticket can sell for on the resale market.