Ed Sheeran performed 60 concerts this year selling over 3 million tickets.
Ed Sheeran returned to touring after a three-year hiatus following his historic 'The Divide Tour' and topped the list of top-selling artists for 2022 after performing to more than 3 million fans in Europe during during this year.
This isn't the first time Ed Sheeran has topped the ticket sales charts. With 'The Divide Tour' he became the first artist to top the chart for two consecutive years – 2018 and 2019.
In fact, in 2018, it recorded its highest annual gross, grossing $429.5 million, and "The Divide Tour" finished 2019 with the highest gross and highest attendance of any tour of all time, with $776.4 million and 8.88 million tickets respectively.
Now, with his return with 'The Mathematics Tour', Ed Sheeran finishes at No. 3 on the top tours for 2022 with $246.3 million in revenue.
But grosses aside, the tour he's currently on is No. 1 on the top tours chart based on total ticket sales worldwide. According to Billboard Boxscore, Ed Sheeran sold 3,047,696 tickets during 2022.
Ed Sheeran performed 63 concerts from 13 December 2021 to 25 September 2022, recording an average of 48,376 tickets sold per night.
But this number is misleading, as the first 11 of these concerts were "rehearsals", where the British singer appeared in small clubs and theaters in London and Dublin. These concerts were attended by 357 people at Whelans, Dublin on 19 April and 5,230 people at London's Royal Albert Hall on 27 March. All 11 concerts together reached 16,810 spectators.
Removing these concerts from the equation, the 52 "regular" concerts of Ed Sheeran's "The Mathematics Tour" in 2022 sold an average of 58,287 tickets per night.
In almost every city – except Helsinki, Finland – Ed Sheeran performed mostly two concerts every Friday and Saturday. Its highlight was a run of five concerts at London's Wembley Stadium, selling a total of 420,269 tickets.
Ed Sheeran's Wembley concert series had the highest total attendance of any concert series this year, surpassing Coldplay's four concerts at Paris' Stade de France which sold more than 100,000 tickets.
Ed Sheeran also broke the 200,000 ticket mark with four concerts at Manchester's Etihad Stadium and Munich's Olympiastadion.
Those numbers are huge, but even compared to his previous tour, 'The Mathematics Tour' is ahead of schedule.
"The Divide Tour" included three European legs held in 2017, 2018 and 2019. These concerts recorded an average of 14,321 tickets sold (the 2017 leg was played indoors), 54,485 and 51,898 tickets, respectively.
Ed Sheeran's 2022 schedule is 7% ahead of his best year yet for 'The Divide Tour', putting him on a pretty good footing as the singer prepares to leave his homeland.
'The Mathematics Tour' will continue with 12 dates in Australia in February and March, followed by 24 dates in North America over the summer.
Whether Sheeran can reach (or even come close to) the three-year total of 'The Divide Tour' is entirely up to him. His European concerts were well attended, but the extent of his pre-pandemic tour was truly massive, including concerts in Asia, South America and South Africa.
If The Mathematics Tour's itinerary remains limited, it will be difficult to triple the tour's current total numbers.
Based on the 36 concerts Ed Sheeran has scheduled for 2023, "The Mathematics Tour" is expected to sell another 1.5 to 1.75 million tickets, and close to 5 million tickets.
