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"You've got to have the cash," Mr. Sigel said. "Nobody's going to take a check from you, because they don't know you. So you've got to be prepared and ready."

This may sound illicit, but what these two middle-aged men with shaved heads are doing is, in fact, legal. Mr. Sigel is a licensed ticket broker, and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of Super Bowl tickets will pass through his hands this week. For Mr. Sigel, just as for the National Football League, this is the pinnacle of the year.

"The Super Bowl is our single biggest event," said Mr. Sigel, who agreed to provide a rare look inside the lucrative world of ticket resale operations.

Mr. Sigel and other ticket brokers like him will spend the week leading up to Sunday's Super Bowl trying to buy as many tickets to the game as they can and then sell them at a profit. Mr. Sigel buys tickets with cash in hand-to-hand transactions, then posts them for sale on his company's Web site, which is technically based in Illinois, where the reselling of tickets is legal. When buyers contact him through the Web site, they can go to a makeshift ticket pickup center — essentially a table manned by Mr. Sigel's sister this week at a downtown hotel — to exchange the money for the tickets.

How much of a profit is made on each sale varies, although Mr. Sigel said selling a ticket that was bought for $1,200 for $1,800 was considered a successful transaction, and that is the normal markup for a ticket. The face value of Super Bowl tickets ranges from $850 to $1,250.

The tickets can come from N.F.L. players or coaches, who all get the opportunity to purchase two tickets from the league to each Super Bowl, or from people who work for companies that are corporate sponsors. The league prohibits its employees, and players and coaches, from selling their tickets for a profit, and has disciplined those it has caught doing so in the past, but the practice remains relatively common and lightly policed. When asked about ticket brokering, the N.F.L. pointed out its policy prohibiting the resale of tickets.

"We're doing what anyone else does in any business," Mr. Sigel said. "We're in the service industry. I provide a service. I give people access to tickets. And a lot of times, I sell tickets for less than I paid for them."

Mr. Sigel, 42, runs a small St. Louis-based company called The Ticket Guys, a Web site where tickets to sporting events and concerts can be purchased. The site was established in 1999, when ticket brokering was not yet legal in Missouri. So Mr. Sigel registered his firm in East St. Louis, Ill. — across the Mississippi River from St. Louis — under the Illinois Ticket Sale and Resale Act. Registering this way separates brokers like Mr. Sigel from the scalpers outside almost every major sporting event.

Mr. Sigel has little to fear from the local police. "We're looking mainly for people trying to sell counterfeit tickets," said Sgt. Mike Sposito of the New Orleans Police Department, adding, "We want to make sure we have a safe, secure event." The police, he said, "don't want people to get taken advantage of."

Gabe Feldman, the director of Tulane Law School Sports Law Program, said that online ticket exchanges can help prevent fraud and consumer deception. "These sites have provided safe, reliable and efficient ways for buyers and sellers to find each other and to allow market forces to dictate the resale price," Mr. Feldman said in an e-mail. "It's virtually impossible to provide that type of protection for face-to-face ticket sales on the street."

The Super Bowl can represent about 10 percent of the company's annual profit, so each year Mr. Sigel and a handful of his co-workers rent a house in the host city a few weeks before the game.