Legal touting has been in football for a while now.
Arsenal have had a relationship with Thomas Cook for many a year. what happens is the club sell the travel agent tickets for games. Thomas Cook then package them up as a holiday deal, including flights (if required) and hotels.
The idea being that you can be a fan in America, visit London, and be guaranteed a ticket.
I am off to Antigua at the end of January for the cricket. I have bought flights, hotel and tickets for all 5 days of the test through a similar company as a package deal. Sport tourism is a huge market.
But Spurs have taken it to the next level by offering these sort of packages direct.
Recently many Tottenham fans received the below Email:
Tickets for the North London Derby, like all away tickets, are capped at £30 (Arsenal then deduct a further £4 for fans)
So Spurs are selling a £30 ticket for £298 (£249+VAT). That is 10 times face value.
Taking into account they have already done their fans over with the new stadium, selling season tickets when they knew it would not be complete, this is another show of greed by the club.
To justify the cost, you get:
- Breakfast with some Spurs legends (probably Micky Hazard and Graham Roberts)
- 10% discount in the club shop (encouraging you to spend even more money
- Travel to the game (probably in Micky Hazard’s cab)
- Match tickets
- Optional return travel
The breakfast will be your bog standard full English. The ones you pay £8 for in a hotel. Taxi fair for the 4m journey is around £16. Plus the ticket, the total cost to Spurs is £54 (or £70 if you want to return to Tottenham High Street).
So fans are paying an additional £244 on top of the basic cost to have legends sit with them at breakfast, and to jump the waiting list for tickets.
Tickets for most away games are at a premium.
Spurs would receive around 3,000 tickets for the trip to Arsenal.
Tickets for the game sold out to Season Ticket Holders with a current total of 362 or more ticketing points (away credits). What buying the package through spurs means is that you could have no ticketing points. Never been to an away game. Not even have a season ticket, and yet jump the queue and get the rarest of rare briefs.
There will be fans who have been to 20-odd away games over the last 3 years who would have missed out on tickets. They find their place taken by someone who has not been to games and paid £298 for the privileged.
Greed is killing football.
Keenos
Follow @KeenosAFC
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon 
Another fantastic article, Keenos. You’ve really outdone yourself this time.
Have you checked how much it is to meet Arsenal “legends” recently? Do I need to provide a link to the Arsenal website?
I am, however, extremely grateful for your continued crusade to ensure Spurs fans aren’t being fleeced. After all, we are the only football club that makes money out of our fans.
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Thank you for your feed back. I open the article with how Arsenal have done similar.
Are you are happy your club charging people £250 and allowing people to get NLD tickets due to what they can afford, rather than how many games they have been too?
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Yeah, you’ve really given it to Arsenal re the Thomas Cook tie up. Completely shamed.
I think it’s a bloody good deal. As much as I understand your point re season ticket holders/points, valid no doubt, this is modern football, and all other teams that have an unbalanced fans to ticket availability ratio do exactly the same. I’d appreciate your crusade a bit more if it were balanced, and expressed the situation in football as a whole, rather than just “them lot down the road”.
And you feel the need to edit my post? Why is this?
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The bitterest pill is hard to take !!
Jam Snap…….
I’ve been to many home games and many away games inUK and all over Europe, My life style is last minute and i’ve many times paid above face value of the ticket price just because its next week or the next day…. Understand your gripe tho……..
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It’s an interesting article but the issue is that AFC does exactly the same thing in terms of getting people to pay over the odds for a ‘big match’ ticket. The fact is that people can afford if and are willing to pay.
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