Bunce Comments on Froch/Kessler Tickets.

Whenever an event is paying its principals an awful lot of money, the organiser/promoter/whatever will look to maximise their revenue. Some companies, like the Eavis clan and Glastonbury, actively try to protect their customers. Others, like LiveNation, do not.

I don't know if Eddie did do that, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. This is an expensive fight to mount and he'll need to maximise all his revenue streams.

 

Eddie would not do such a thing.

He's the Robin Hood of promoters.

 

It's probably difficult to say if he has or not, no doubt the matter lacks transparency and it would be nice to get some clarification, apparently he reads all the forums so hopefully he is reading this! If you are reading this Eddie then do something about your customers getting shafted after spending a whole day and night trying to get tickets!

I take the point about needing to maximise revenue but isn't that the point of it being on PPV anyway? So that the fight could happen financially? If it now means expensive tickets anyway, PPV, and also having to pay 4/5 times the face value of an already expensive ticket then I think he can keep his super fights in future!

I wonder what happened with danish allocation of tickets, and if they're being sold on by resale agents. Would they be sold by Sauerland directly?

 

He probably did nothing to help the touts, but nothing to stop them either.

 

Doing nothing to stop them is essentially helping them really. It's not strictly allowed as a lot of the time on the small print it says something like "not for resale" but no one really cares. The government actually banned the resale of Olympics tickets online but clearly don't care about music or sports tickets being re-sold at a vastly inflated rate. It's unfair on the event organisers too in a way as they have little control over it a lot of the time and probably take quite a lot of grief from the public as a result. Still annoying though, if people just refused to buy them from these places then they'd lose money and stop doing it but they trade on peoples desperation, loyalty or simply having too much money and not knowing the value of it.

 

Its not illegal, he couldn't do anything about it even if he wanted to

 

Naturally, but...

This is a major issue across all live events - I doubt one, relatively small fish is going to have much of an impact on a business practice that's been a bane for years.

Which Icemax sums up so well. There's likely an element of Eddie selling on the medium tier seats to the resellers, keeping ringside sales separate, making a bundle on corporate tickets (although I'd be surprised if boxing is a big draw for that audience), and then touts hammering whatever is left.

 

I'm pretty sure other people in the past have cancelled any tickets which are being offered for resale and re-offered them for sale to the general public? Could Eddie not do this?

From his point of view I can see why he wouldn't, what does he care, he's sold out in 20 minutes which sounds great in interviews, he's got the money and he's happy. It's no skin off his nose if 65% of the people in attendance paid 4 or 5 times the face value of a ticket.

 

I spotted one ticket on ebay worth £5K

 

The thing is it isn't actually all that difficult to stop it. The booking fees are outrageous as they are so why not make them earn that money with a simple ID system and print names on tickets. Then you have to have matching ID to get in the arena on the night. In sure if thy really wanted to stop it they could recall all tickets on eBay as well