What is everyone's take on buying sports tickets when released by the team solely to resale them to scalpers or to sell them on 3rd party website like StubHub or TicketExchange.

I understand that website like StubHub and TicketExchange provide a great service for season ticket holders or those they may have bought/given single game tickets but then needed to sell these tickets due to being unable to go. I also understand that those who own PSL's or season tickets incur expenses above the summation of the face-value price of all of individual tickets they get. Thus I think it reasonable that they be allowed to up-charge to account for the true cost they paid for the tickets.

In contrast it seems a lot of people buy tickets when they go on-sale for the sole purpose of placing them on resell websites (i.e. stubhub/ticket-exchange). For example here in Portland, tickets for the upcoming MLS playoff game started at 10AM. Just for my experiment I checked out the price for tickets within the "General Admission" Timbers Army (basically the hooligan section) that I typically sit in. I also checked StubHub and there were perhaps half a dozen for sell (likely by season ticket holders who got ticket access at 10PM last night after homefield advantage was confirmed). The tickets on the Timbers website for sell to the general public were selling for $41/each. By 10:05AM all these seats were gone and but by this afternoon there were literally dozens of these tickets selling for a minimum of $65 up to $125 (actually saw an outlier for $220).

If this occurs for a MLS game in Portland I can only imagine what occurs for NFL games in other cities.
In Portland scalping is actually heavily frowned upon. With all but one 6 MLS game i've attended this season, I got tickets for free or face value from strangers.

A month ago, even before San Diego started tanking, I was checking out tickets for the Cheifs v Chargers game. I'd estimate at least 1/3 of these seats were up for sale on the secondary market.

Thoughts?

10/26/2015 7:03:58 PM

1) Learn the proper usage of sale versus sell

10/26/2015 7:13:08 PM

Tickets should be non-transferrable like plane tickets. you buy it. you go.

10/26/2015 9:31:43 PM

i think people that cant go or just decide they dont want to for whatever reason should be able to sell to recoup their real costs

but i cant stand people that buy tickets as an "investment"

classic example of a middle man adding markup without adding value

10/26/2015 10:08:54 PM