Newcastle have an allocation of 31,939 tickets for next month’s final against Liverpool and the first official tickets went on sale to eligible fans at Wednesday lunchtime.
Live Football Tickets, a site based in Madrid, is listing dozens of what it claims are tickets in the Newcastle end for £1,495 while Ticombo, which operates out of Germany, is offering pairs of tickets “seated together” at £1,700 each. A single VIP box ticket is being sold for an eye-watering £8,000.
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Read MoreIndeed The i Paper understands that the club have a number of live investigations ongoing into fans – some in relation to Carabao Cup final tickets – and have banned 43 fans since the start of last season for reselling tickets.
Industry experts think a combination of corporate tickets falling into the hands of professional touts, club membership schemes being manipulated and unscrupulous fans selling on their own tickets is how they eventually make it onto the resale market, where many are sold on to overseas supporters prepared to pay the big mark-ups.
Ticket resales has become a big issue at St James’ Park (Photo: Getty)
Indeed The i Paper understands that as part of their research into the problem Newcastle United officials have, on numerous occasion, tried to buy tickets advertised on the sites but that they haven’t actually been available.
Reg Walker, a ticketing expert and security consultant at the Iridium Consultancy, says touts are “incredibly savvy and well-organised” and tighter laws are needed to crack down on the issue.
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Read More“The problem is you are talking about hundreds of millions of pounds worth of football tickets, memberships and hospitality that are harvested by touts that are resold at exorbitant prices.
Clubs are belatedly beginning to battle the issue with Liverpool recently cancelling 100,000 ticketing accounts that were either run by or under the control of touts. But the scale of the reselling operations is eye-watering, with Walker warning that only tightening up legislation will begin to combat it.
“At the moment the offence is a summary one, not an indictable one, so you get summoned to court and get a slap on the wrist. There’s a simple solution: make the offence indictable and then you need [to] make the legislation supranational so it’s an offence anywhere in the world and you prevent a situation where a website can be set up in Spain and tickets are bounced there, circumnavigating the existing laws.”
Ticombo and Live Football Tickets were contacted for comment.
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