With 2015 beckoning, the thoughts of sports fans will turn to how they are to get their fix in a 12-month period that features a home Ashes series and a Rugby World Cup alongside the usual annual highlights. But never mind Get Me In, it’s likely to be more a case of get your wallet out. The booming market for sports tickets on secondary sites will satisfy any lust for sporting action – but often only at a huge price.
England v Scotland in the Six Nations at Twickenham? Seatwave will do you a pair of tickets in the East Stand Lower for £2,400. How about some cricket? Tickets for the first day of the first Ashes Test in Cardiff are already selling for £329 each, among hundreds of others for all five Tests, on the same site.
Browse the main secondary ticketing sites – Viagogo, Get Me In, Stub Hub, Seatwave – and you will see thousands upon thousands of tickets for big sporting events on sale at huge mark-ups.
While the resale of football tickets is against the law and specific legislation banned resale for the London Olympics, everything else is fair game. Organisers can theoretically refuse entry for breaking the terms and conditions on the back of the ticket, but in practice that is hard to police.
Discontent about the way that the market for sporting tickets is being warped out of shape by the burgeoning secondary market has been building among some governing bodies, with critics claiming they are fuelled by unscrupulous traders using computer software to snap up tickets in seconds. But it is the Rugby World Cup, taking place in England and Wales next year, that has really thrust the issue into the spotlight.
Category B tickets for England’s crunch group stage clash with Australia at Twickenham next October, with an already steep face value of £215 each, are already being touted for an eye-watering £1,500 each on rival secondary ticketing site Viagago. Ironically Ticketmaster, which is England 2015’s official ticketing partner, recently bought secondary operator Get Me In.
For their part, secondary ticketing sites insist they are providing a service the public wants in a safer and more user-friendly manner than the street-corner touts of yore. They say the big prices at the top end of the market are the exception rather than the rule. “The idea that event tickets on Viagogo are all sold at crazy prices is a myth,” says Oliver Wheeler, director of communications at the site. “The majority are at face value or less, and it is only tickets to major finals or very special concerts that are listed at high prices.”
He points to ComRes research that shows more than three-quarters of the British public believe that ticket holders should be allowed to resell and just over a third say they would be prepared to pay above face value for a ticket. “Tickets for the Rugby World Cup start at less than £60, and tickets for the final start at around £1,000, which incidentally is about a quarter of the price of a hospitality package from the organisers,” he said.
They say that governing bodies should accept the reality of the secondary market and partner with them to offer a safe platform. Viagogo has agreements with Scottish Rugby, the ATP Tour and various football clubs. But the Rugby World Cup has become the lightning rod for criticism because the number of tickets snapped up at speed and the price for which they are immediately being resold has rammed home the scale of the problem.
The digital age has given rise to a generation of bedroom touts who operate with none of the risks of the old street corner variety and, insist the Metropolitan police, MPs and peers campaigning on the issue, increasingly have links with organised crime.
The Met’s own report into their anti-touting operation at the London 2012 Games recommended tighter regulation of the resale market to “help consumers to understand who they are buying from and therefore better protect themselves against ticket crime”.
While sports fans may once have grumbled about high ticket prices and even seen secondary sites as a force for good in enabling them to sell on tickets they were unable to use at a small profit, there is a sense that consumer sentiment has turned.
Those loud rumblings will again reach the rarefied air of the red benches on Monday when the Consumer Protection Bill receives its third reading in the House of Lords. An amendment to the bill introduced by the former British Olympic Association chairman Lord Moynihan has become the focal point for a bitter battle over how the needs of consumers and sport in general should be best served. The coalition of cross-party peers, backed by Labour, is determined that Moynihan’s amendment should become law, while the government is digging in the other way.
When this issue first began bubbling in 2008, the nascent secondary ticketing market painted itself as being on the side of the consumer in helping them resell tickets they could no longer use and purchase tickets for sold-out events. Some argued this was simply the free market in action and that consumers should have the right to do whatever they liked with their ticket. Sporting bodies responded, then as now, that they deliberately priced tickets below the absolute market rate to encourage wide accessibility.
In the midst of the greatest sustained boom this country has ever seen in terms of the desire of the population to watch live sport, some governing bodies are now beginning to wonder whether they should not reluctantly cut out the middleman and ratchet up prices still higher themselves.
While such claims may be viewed with a snort of derision by some fans, the economics of the secondary market bear them out. The big sports also point to the risk of fraud and tickets that may not even exist – one report last year put the level of online fraud at an astonishing £1.5bn.
The secondary ticketing sites – many of them launched with venture capital cash as part of a post-millennial wave of “disrupters” that included online betting exchanges and payday loan companies – responded, insisting that customers were protected because they would refund the cash if tickets didn’t exist or fans couldn’t get in.
“If the government chooses not to intervene, sports may review whether to raise the price of tickets closer to levels charged on the secondary market, which would at least ensure that profits made are reinvested back into sport,” said the executives in charge of tennis, rugby union and cricket in a letter to the government seen by the Observer.
“We are reluctant to do so because it is important that access to elite sport is as wide as possible, and believe that this approach is tacitly encouraged by politicians on all sides of the House who continue to stress the importance of keeping sport affordable.”
You could argue some sports try to have their cake and eat it. Wimbledon, for example, makes a ferocious fuss every year about the secondary ticketing market and has form in refusing entry to those who buy through it. Yet debenture holders, who have paid £50,000 for their seat for five years, are allowed to resell at a profit.
But for most it is a straightforward case of losing control of the ticketing process. Having failed in their attempts to lobby government to introduce specific legislation to ban the resale of tickets, the Rugby World Cup 2015 chief executive Debbie Jevans is resigned to having to continually repeat her warning to only buy tickets from official channels.
She hopes a resale mechanism for fans to sell at face value and repeated warnings that fans who have bought tickets may not be allowed in will be enough to deter them.
“We support the amendment to the Consumer Rights Bill because it will protect the public,” said Jevans. “Our message is clear – only buy Rugby World Cup tickets through official channels to avoid disappointment.”
The amendment to the bill appears simple enough. By forcing those selling tickets on the secondary market to make the seat and row number public, its proponents argue that it empowers customers who will know what they’re buying.
But the knock-on effect will be that it will also allow sporting bodies to cancel those tickets under their terms and conditions if they can see they are being sold at a huge profit or on an industrial scale.
That would shift the balance of power back to the sports and potentially undermine what has grown into a lucrative business model for those secondary ticketing sites that take a slice of each sale.
Viagogo’s Wheeler said that it was wholly in favour of making it clear what section of the stadium tickets were for but did not want to give governing bodies the ability to cancel tickets and undermine its business.
“We are in favour of making information clearer on our website and are constantly looking for new ways to do so,” he said. “However, publishing original seller identity is unnecessary because all tickets come with the Viagogo guarantee, and publishing specific seat numbers allows rights owners to cancel tickets which are being legitimately resold. Anyone can see that is not in the consumer’s best interests.”
While secondary ticketing sites point out that they refund anyone who ultimately gets turned away at the turnstile, that refund does not include the price of travel or accommodation. Nor can it compensate for the disappointment of missing a potential once-in-a-lifetime moment. Moynihan points to groups of fans who travelled to Gleneagles for the Ryder Cup, only to be turned away at the gate.
The sporting revolution that has flowed from London’s successful bid to host the 2012 Olympics and led to a string of major sporting events coming to these shores has been sold on the idea that hosting them can help inspire young people. That rationale might stretch credulity at times, but it is an even harder sell if they are all priced out by corporate thrill-seekers.
“We put pressure on the RFU to make Rugby World Cup prices affordable, but if you don’t back it up with legislation you just open it up to huge margins of profit by organised gangs,” said the shadow sports minister Clive Efford. “I met a delegation from Tokyo 2020 and they asked me why the London Games were so successful. I said it was the atmosphere and the athletes in the sports stadiums. We had an excellent system of recycling tickets – the stadiums were full of people who would go in and shout like mad people, everyone felt it through their TV screens and across the world. It stayed affordable even when tickets were being recycled.”
Efford said the government risked humiliation unless the culture secretary Sajid Javid could be persuaded to change his mind on the issue. The government is still opposing the amendment, arguing existing legislation can do the job. Critics say that is patently not the case. Javid defended the current arrangement in the most recent Commons debate on the issue and appears determined to hold the line, although the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills is believed to be more open to negotiation.
“All we’re asking is for consumers to be better informed so they make better choices. What could be more free market than that. Once you make the consumer better informed, you make the organiser better informed and they can take appropriate action,” said Efford. “It’s a murky web. It’s not about a free market, it’s about fixing the market and ripping off the consumer.”