Newcastle United are clamping down on people selling their tickets without going through the proper channels and at the recent Fan Advisory Board meeting mentioned that they have in fact banned 43 people from St James' Park so far.
It's not news to anybody that the club have taken big measures to ensure that tickets can not just be swapped around between people at will.
Many fans feel that this move is unfair and overly complicates matters, especially if plans change last minute, but the rules are there and must be adhered to.
It has now been revealed that the club are taking breaches very seriously having slapped 43 people with bans already.
It's not the genuine fans passing their tickets on to friends that the club are targetting, however. In fact, the rules that have been put in place are to combat instances of when match day tickets appear on third-party sites at inflated prices when there are so many people trying to get tickets via legitimate means for the actual cost of a match ticket being forced to miss out on the St James' Park experience.
"This season, 52,000 bot attacks from SeatGeek have been identified and prevented. There are currently 750 ongoing cases from last season and this season where supporters are being monitored for ticket touting. These are monitored by being alerted by other supporters that they are reselling or irregular buying patterns."
We're actually happy to see the club trying their best to clamp down on this abhorrent profiteering.
We reached out to the Newcastle United Supporters Trust and Chairman, Paul Karter got back to us, who was the perfect respondent given his place on the Fan Advisory Board, and we asked his thoughts on these bans.
"We are grateful for the information provided by the club, and we advised that this information should be shared with the fan base to show that the club take supporters selling tickets on extremely seriously."
Hopefully, now that the club has communicated that they aren't just making idle threats, these ticket scalpers will start to disappear giving genuine fans a better chance of landing a ticket to a game through the proper channels.
PL | GD | PTS | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Liverpool
|
14 | 18 | 35 |
2 |
Chelsea
|
15 | 17 | 31 |
3 |
Arsenal
|
15 | 14 | 29 |
4 |
Manchester City
|
15 | 6 | 27 |
5 |
Nottingham Forest
|
15 | 1 | 25 |
6 |
Aston Villa
|
15 | 0 | 25 |
7 |
Brighton
|
15 | 3 | 24 |
8 |
Bournemouth
|
15 | 3 | 24 |
9 |
Brentford
|
15 | 3 | 23 |
10 |
Fulham
|
15 | 2 | 23 |
11 |
Tottenham Hotspur
|
15 | 12 | 20 |
12 |
Newcastle United
|
15 | -2 | 20 |
13 |
Manchester United
|
15 | 1 | 19 |
14 |
West Ham United
|
15 | -8 | 18 |
15 |
Everton
|
14 | -7 | 14 |
16 |
Leicester
|
15 | -9 | 14 |
17 |
Crystal Palace
|
15 | -6 | 13 |
18 |
Ipswich
|
15 | -13 | 9 |
19 |
Wolves
|
15 | -15 | 9 |
20 |
Southampton
|
15 | -20 | 5 |