The ticket for the recent Six Nations clash between England and Ireland at Twickenham would have had a face value of £70 but ended up being purchased on ticketing website Viagogo, which allows sports fans to purchase tickets above face value.

Farrell was assigned the tickets and is believed to have given them to a friend or relative in good faith.

He is said to be “shocked and upset” that the ticket was sold on the black market and the RFU are confident that he had no knowledge of the sale, but they could still punish him as the fate of the ticket is ultimately his responsibility.

The RFU suspended James Haskell’s ticket allocation for three matches for a similar offence back in 2009.

The fan who purchased the ticket, a 39-year-old Irish woman who lives in London named Rose Waldron, said she paid the excessive price for the ticket as she was so desperate to see the game.

The ticket was listed for sale at £350, but the total price came to £440 when VAT and reseller fees were taken into account.

“I’d tried every other avenue and at 10pm on Friday night I decided to buy a ticket online,” she told the Irish media.

“What a surprise when I received my ticket to find it was allocated to Owen Farrell of the England rugby team.”

The RFU said: “We are satisfied that Owen Farrell did nothing untoward intentionally and had no knowledge of this sale.

“We are looking into the circumstances around how this ticket came to be available on a secondary ticketing site, something we take extremely seriously.”

The RFU have looked to crackdown on the illegal sale of tickets in recent years and in 2009 they imposed sanctions on 41 clubs, constituent bodies, schools and individuals for selling tickets above face value.

However, the fact that Farrell’s ticket was sold on Viagogo is particularly embarrassing for the RFU as in 2012 they won a ruling against the company in the Supreme Court that obliged them to name the seller of their tickets.

The match at Twickenham, which England won 13-10, was an 82,000 sell-out with tickets exchanging hands for upwards of £2,500 on the black market.