The Thousand Pound Rugby Ticket
| 17:13 UK time, Monday, 12 March 2012
Lucy looks at her laptop outside the Millennium Stadium
Tickets for Wales’ Grand Slam match against France are on sale for £1,000, X-Ray has found.
Internet reselling sites – where fans and touts can resell tickets for any price they like – are full of tickets for Wales closing Six Nations game in Cardiff on March 17.
Viagogo, one of the biggest sites, has had tickets for £599, £899 and £999. Other big resellers like
Seatwave are also advertising tickets for over £600.
But ruby fan Jon Eastwood from Porthmadog is particularly angered by another reseller Getmein – which was again selling tickets for over £600. The website is owned by Ticketmaster – the official ticketing agents of the WRU.
Jon can’t understand why the company is allowed to do this and believes this kind of touting is killing the game for ordinary fans.
“I've loved rugby all my life. It's just one of those things those sporting events that brings the country together,” he said.
“I’ve been online looking for tickets and when you do tend to find these sites they do tend to go for ridiculous kinds of money. Some for six or seven hundred pounds a ticket, which is really a lot of money to spend. It's just not fair. It's stopping real fans from going by selling these tickets above market value.”
The WRU ticketing terms and conditions ban the sale of tickets for above face value. But unlike football tickets or tickets for the Olympics, it is perfectly legal for touts to make a profit selling on the black market.
The WRU refused to say if they had put pressure on Ticketmaster to pull tickets from the Getmein site but they say they “monitors any secondary sales of match tickets on a daily basis”.
“Where it is possible to establish the purchaser of the tickets, the WRU will take all available action to ensure the removal of the tickets from sale,” they said in a statement.
“The includes but is not limited to, sanctions being levied against the registered holder, cancellation of the tickets and the blacklisting of customers to prevent them from any future purchase of international tickets.”
The WRU say they want the touting of rugby tickets to be illegal in the same way as football tickets.
