The New York Yankees have made headlines as spring training kicks off ahead of the 2016 Major League Baseball season for reasons other than their play on the field. The Yankees have banned print-at-home tickets for all home games this year. The move is a part of the clubs on-going and tumultuous relationship with secondary ticket market giant StubHub.
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A statement released on the team’s website recently states that the only tickets that will be accepted at Yankee Stadium in 2016 will be traditional hard stock paper tickets as well as new mobile tickets. “Print-at-home paper tickets (PDFs) are being discontinued so as to further combat fraud and counterfeiting of tickets associated with print-at-home paper tickets.” All fans that purchase tickets through Yankees.com, Ticketmaster.com, or over the phone at Ticketmaster will have the option to either use a mobile ticket or a traditional hard copy.
This transition is seemingly directed towards StubHub, the secondary ticket market place where tickets are often printed by the user themselves from a PDF. Yankees’ fans will still be able to purchase tickets on StubHub for home games but they will need to do so soon enough to get traditional hard copy tickets delivered or they can pick them up from the StubHub brick and mortar location, roughly a mile away from the stadium.
Banning the print-at-home tickets will make it harder for fans to buy tickets on secondary markets such as StubHub on game day since a major draw of these websites is to purchase tickets for less than face value on the day of the game sometimes very close to the opening pitch.
The Yankees have an exclusive deal with Ticketmaster and they have a price floor set so that no tickets are sold below face value for any games; where as StubHub has a minimum of only $6 for MLB tickets.
Initially the idea to ban print-at-home tickets sounds great since it hopes to prevent fraud. However the fraud associated with fake PDF printed tickets as reported by the Yankees is about five to six tickets per game; for which StubHub reimbursed the organization about $100,000. To put that number into perspective the team’s payroll was $216.4 million in 2015 and they made $508 million in revenue in 2014.
The Yankees are not the first team to try and prevent fans from purchasing tickets on StubHub. The 2015 NBA Champion Golden State Warriors are dealing with similar issues at the moment. As well as a number of other high profile big market MLB teams such as the Chicago Cubs and L.A. Angles, who backed out of a new MLB and StubHub deal a few of years ago.
Only time will tell if this move by the second most valuable team in all of pro sports signals a larger push away from secondary ticket markets; but today technology is meant to provide consumers and fans with more options, not less.
This issue could become a much bigger problem on a scale far larger than sports, sooner than later.