When tickets become available for sport’s biggest contests, ordinary fans usually don’t have much hope of snapping them up.
Tickets put on general sale typically represent only a small percentage of the total inventory – if they are available at all– given a significant portion are usually allocated to hospitality sales, sponsors or stakeholders.
This takes top-tier live sport out of the reach of potential and casual followers and creates a perennial challenge that traditionally forced many to explore less conventional ticket-buying channels.
But, thankfully, gone are the days when you had to slip cash to a ticket seller in the shadows of a stadium, hoping that the piece of paper handed to you by a complete stranger would turn out to be a genuine ticket.
There is no doubt that secondary – or resale – ticketing is to thank for this change for good.
Indeed the secondary market’s growth following the launch of StubHub in 2000, and the sector’s subsequent expansion through to the present day, illustrates a continuing squeeze on general access to tickets that many clubs and event organisers have failed to address.
Indeed, it is easy to understand why average fans are often left disgruntled. In arguably the first high-profile example that attracted global attention nearly half a million tickets were handed out to sponsors at the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany.
Just weeks after Italy lifted the World Cup at Berlin’s Olympiastadion in front of 69,000 spectators, but nowhere near as many actual fans, viagogo launched, supercharging the secondary ticketing scene with a major new international player.
Since then, the broader ticketing space has been relatively sluggish to embrace innovation, with precious little centralisation across a fragmented industry. Crucially, ticketing often sits in a silo, detached from more impactful marketing strategies that have at least started to delve into what fans actually want in a post-Covid world.
This creates a problem surrounding ticket accessibility that the likes of viagogo – now in partnership with StubHub’s North American operations – is helping to solve.
Popularity
It is estimated that the secondary ticketing market is worth about $30bn (€26.6bn) per year globally, with between one-fifth and one-sixth of all primary tickets being resold.
This staggering amount illustrates beyond doubt that providing fans with a safe, secure and regulated place to buy and sell tickets plays an essential role in a thriving sporting event.
For the event hosts, ticketing remains a key source of revenue for sports enterprises worldwide, alongside media rights and commercial income.
Increasing access to tickets through an additional distribution channel drives higher attendances, which inevitably lead to better atmospheres and more appealing spectacles. This, in turn, helps to fuel interest in coverage, leading to better negotiating terms for hosts and potentially more lucrative commercial partnership and media-rights fees, as well as a boost to sales of food, drink and merchandise.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that, for sports rights-holders, the pandemic-enforced social-distancing restrictions of 2020 and 2021 was the stuff of nightmares. After all, try selling commercial partnerships, coverage, club shirts and hotdogs to a stadium full of empty seats.
However, the truth is that even with the turnstiles now fully open, so-called ‘no-shows’ remain a major headache in the sports and entertainment industry in a post-pandemic landscape. As many as one in five ticket-holders did not attend concerts in the US during 2021, for example.
Even before the emergence of Covid-19 though, popular sporting competitions like German football’s Bundesliga were reporting a no-show rate of approximately 10% of all sold tickets. That’s a lot of ticketing inventory simply going to waste.
Safe and secure
Secondary ticketing platforms not only help to fill empty seats with eager attendees, but they also provide significant marketing benefits by promoting events to a broader audience – and the appetite is global for platforms that can safely facilitate ticket transactions.
In viagogo’s case, the platform is a safe space where fans across 175 countries can access 50 million event listings at any one time available in 40 languages and 38 different currencies.
Indeed, following the UK Government’s recent response to the Competition and Markets Authority’s 2021 report and recommendations on secondary ticketing – which confirmed support of the resale market for live events – viagogo is laser-focused on offering a secure marketplace that complies with regulators.
There are clear benefits for the sellers, whether they are offloading spare tickets, have encountered a chance in circumstance or have commitments that have scuppered their initial plans – they can still recoup their money. For eventgoers, there is an additional opportunity to secure seats at sought-after events, supplementing the buying channels courtesy of the event’s organisers.
Another unforeseen advantage that should be noted is that the value of season tickets could edge up, with those who hold such passes given a safe and secure way to generate income from enabling others to attend games that they would have missed anyway.
Valuable partnerships
Between viagogo and StubHub we have had hundreds of partnerships all over the world with some of sport’s highest-profile rights-holders, venue operators, clubs, leagues, and promoters, including the likes of AEG, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, Chelsea FC and Paris Saint-Germain.
For our partners, we can provide valuable first-party data and customer insights, giving teams and competition organisers an opportunity to better understand fans and their behaviours, opening up significant marketing possibilities.
Despite providing significant value to leagues, clubs, fans and the sports ecosystem as a whole, secondary marketplaces like viagogo have become convenient targets for criticism, much of which is not based in reality, given that ticket prices are always set by the sellers.
In fact, the dynamic nature of the resale marketplace means that tickets will often be sold for less than their face value. Furthermore, in viagogo’s case, transactions have a 100-per-cent refund guarantee if there is a problem with the ticket that has been bought – an incredibly rare occurrence with less than 0.02 per cent of ticket buyers ever experiencing issues at the gate.
In short, imagine a sporting world without secondary ticketing: fewer opportunities for fans, less money in their pocket, and more empty seats. With tickets for more than 200 million live event attendees processed every year, the public is clearly already on board with resale.
So, by working more closely with secondary ticketing platforms like viagogo, the sports industry can expand its reach, better understand its audience, improve fan engagement and add a distribution channel that is safe, secure, reliable and regulated. This puts the fan back in control – and that can only be a positive thing.