I had the recent awful experience of trying to get Oasis tickets.  I didn’t get any as I gave up after staring at my PC screen for three hours and still being 70,000^th in the queue.  I’m glad I did as a few hours later, tickets were being sold for 3x their ‘face value’.  The European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority have both suggested that they are going to investigate ‘dynamic pricing’ and ticket selling generally.  But are more rules and oversight the right thing to be doing?

A more pleasant recent experience has been to see my beloved Leicester City beat the Premier League in court regarding the potential to apply a point deduction for breaking Profit & Sustainability Rules.  These rules are a mess and as Leicester proved, very badly worded.

As the WKM team know, I try and avoid imposing rules wherever possible.  Clearly, they are sometimes needed, however as soon as you create rules, they will be tested, and people will either try and get around them or forget about them.  There must be a balance between appropriate levels of oversight and creating the right culture and standards that people do the right thing by themselves, without external pressure.

Our regulator, the FCA, introduced ‘Consumer Duty’ regulation last year with the aim being to make sure that ‘firms must act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers’.  The first part of the new regulation is titled ‘Culture, governance and monitoring’.  There is another rule in the FCA handbook that ensures firms communications are ‘fair, clear and not misleading’.  Ticketmaster’s use of ‘dynamic pricing’ is not illegal, however I would argue that it fails on most of the FCA’s guidance for financial firms.

The best customer outcomes are when the level of oversight is just right and the culture of firms naturally create good outcomes for customers.  Who is responsible for the oversight for Ticketmaster?  Yep, you’ve guessed it – they are self-regulated.  Therefore, we have to hope that they create the right culture to create good outcomes for customers.  Well, the Oasis ticket debacle shows that is not the case.  I’ve heard some people justify the ‘dynamic pricing’ model saying things like ‘well other industries, like airlines do it’.  Buying a ticket on a flight is very different to buying a ticket for Oasis.  ‘Dynamic pricing’ suggests that prices go up and down.  Flight prices do as there are a lot of variables that go into the cost of a seat on a plane.  I wonder how many tickets through Ticketmaster go down from their original face value?  If Ticketmaster were regulated by the FCA, I suspect offering a Manchester Oasis ticket at £148, only to be actually sold at £355 an hour later would not be a good outcome for customers and is hardly fair, clear and not misleading.  Ticketmaster’s Dynamic Pricing is effectively the same as pricing by touts.

There is some commonality to football with all of this too.  Valencia, in Spain, has announced they are introducing dynamic pricing for their tickets.  Who regulates UK football?  Is it FIFA, UEFA, Premier League, EFL, the FA?  Well, it turns out that these bodies aren’t enough and the King’s speech in July confirmed that the Football Governance Bill will introduce a new Independent Football Regulator (IFR).  Football is an industry that clearly needs more oversight and that the culture in the industry has a lot to be desired.  Most of the IFR’s objective are around financial rules, which desperately need updating, but also included is a code of governance that clearly is not fit for purpose.

The other poor outcome from the Oasis ticket debacle was the technology.  I, like everyone else, knew that the websites were going to crash that Saturday morning, and they lived up to our expectations.  I was kicked out four times and had numerous errors meaning I couldn’t get back on.  Arguments are that there are so many people trying to get on, that is the sort of thing that happens – just accept it.  Well, for Euro 2024 tickets, there were 50m applications (maybe 5x higher than Oasis tickets) yet there were no website failures and 2m tickets were distributed.  That was because it was done by ballot.  They knew there would be huge demand so managed it in a sensible way.  Oasis, their management and Ticketmaster knew demand would be huge yet they chose the method to maximise profit at the cost of consumer outcomes.  The band has since come out and said that they didn’t realise Ticketmaster would apply dynamic pricing (nicely passing the buck) and two new dates will be sold by ballot, which is a bit too late for most.  Will the industry learn from this?

Football and ticket sales are both industries that clearly need better oversight, however unless the culture improves, regulation should and will come down.  The banking industry is a good example, where poor governance and culture led to very poor outcomes in 2008, which led to heavy regulation.  I hope that in the coming year that Leicester takes advantage of the lack of penalty point deduction and survive in the Premier League and that getting tickets for gigs becomes a better experience without the need for more rules!