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A Toronto Star/CBC investigation tracked online ticket listings for the team’s 2018 home opener and found that the average price for online seats was 205 per cent of face value — with the club getting a cut of each online sale.

The Toronto Blue Jays receive secret commissions on every ticket sold on StubHub, allowing the club to profit on the scalping of its own seats — all without telling fans — a joint Toronto Star/CBC investigation has found.

Earning profit from the resale of the team’s tickets without telling fans is “unethical,” says Richard Powers, associate professor Rotman School of Management.

“That is totally misleading and increases the cost to consumers,” he said. “Getting in bed with the secondary market who they fight against all the time in every other venue, it just seems unethical.”

In a recent interview with Sportnet, Jays president Mark Shapiro said that today’s home opener would be “the highest-revenue game in the history of Rogers Centre.”

https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2018/03/29/jays-get-a-cut-from-online-scalpers.html

Listen, let's be blunt. This is the way of the world. The people posting tickets on Stubhub or others, are mainly fans. They are consumers to begin with. There are 45,000-plus seats at the Rogers Centre, 20,000 at the Air Canada Centre. Season seats are expensive. I am a Raptors season seatholder. If the Raptors played the maximum number of playoff games - 16 - my upper bowl seats would cost over $8,500 dollars. I can't afford that. So maybe I will go to 3-4 games myself, and post the rest. I will have no trouble making small profits on what I resell, the market is enormous. I already offered playoff games to my biggest regular season buyers, told them the cost to me is up a lot this season, thought they would be scared off, but no one blinked. One guy even told me the prices were reasonable.

Most of my selling is at cost price to a handful of regulars that are almost like partners (though I haven't met most of them in person; I have visited one of their Facebook pages, and judging by their names, they are a microcosm of the New Toronto - a lot of successful young professionals and artists from multi-cultural backgrounds.) No one is getting screwed. No one is forced to buy. If someone puts playoff tickets up for sale, they are transparent on the various web sites. Buyers can cruise the arena seat map on Ticketmaster and find seats available at a range of prices. If someone asks too much for a pair, they will go unsold, or the seller will lower his or her price.

The secondary market exists because the games are expensive to begin with and becoming more and more expensive. But it also exists because of strong demand. I don't consider any of this "unethical".

The issue for me is what the teams do with their big profits. The Jays should soon be a major market payroll team, rather than a mid-market. The Raptors should be a tax paying team when it warrants keeping a good group together, as I believe it will through the current contract cycle. MLSE has it good with the Leafs and a hard cap, but I expect them to put every legal dollar possible into keeping up the talent level, whether it's signing overseas free agents to re-stock the development stream, or maintaining the best coaching and front office staff on the planet.

The rest is self-adjusting. If the teams suck, the secondary market disappears. If the teams win, the fans are happy, inside or outside the arena or stadium.

I'd rather have a secondary market and a parade than cheap seats and a team run by Good Ash or Rob Babcock.

It's time for Rogers to buy The Star so they can stop having critical news written about their operations.

That said, this makes sense. The net result is essentially the same as dynamic pricing, it's just a convoluted way of doing it. And as a bonus for season ticket holders that actually go to games, they don't pay the markup since they don't re-sell the tickets. The cooperation between MLB teams and StubHub allows the process to be relatively seamless. I don't see an issue.

I don't have a problem with them doing it, in general. It's something that they should probably be transparent about, however, just because teams ought to be transparent about those sorts of revenue streams that directly impact fans, and because of StubHub's relationship with real scalpers...not the STHs reselling some of their tickets, but the ones buying out big volume for the marquee games.

Someone should introduce the CBC and Toronto Star's investigating teams to Google search. MLB teams have been partnered with Stubhub on this for years:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stubhub-renews-partnership-with-major-league-baseball-to-continue-as-the-official-fan-to-fan-ticket-marketplace-of-mlbcom-and-mlb-clubs-300558155.html

When the Jays win yes the team will profit from all the sales on stubhub. After today and this weekend’s series there will be no demand on the secondary market like Stubhub and thus their cut will be smaller or no cut at all as tickets will go unsold. Those ticket brokers will lose money and cancel their season tickets next season. Actual fans that are season ticket holders will lose money and also consider getting out.

I’m a Raptors STH as well and got in when they were tanking and they were so desperate that time for new STH like me that they gave me two pairs of coutside seats that season. But during the tanking years I couldn’t even get rid of my tickets for free to people. No one wanted them. So instead I would donate a lot of games I couldn’t go to to kids charity. Last 4 years have been great bc demand was so high and I can sell tickets at small profit. We all know in sports that unless your the Spurs or Patriots, teams will go through ups and downs. Jays will be down this year. I totally expect Raptors will be tanking one of these years and I’ll know I’ll be losing a lot of money and go back to not being able to get rid of tickets for free again. When that happens the prices will go down again.


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I bought 30 Jays games last year, most on StubHub at fair prices from STH who wanted to dump extra seats. I also buy early, when prices are lowest. Its a way for me to build my own Jays mini-pack and not have to commit to seasons. I've got a good pair in the 200s for tonight's Yankees game which my daughter is using.

I bought 45 Raps pairs (90 singles) for 19 games this season from 5 season seat holders. Again, I buy early and the prices are fair. I prefer this to being a season ticket holder (which I was up to 2012).

What bothers me is when I see season ticket holders who are selling tickets for super high markups. Apparently, this summer the law will mandate nothing more than face value + 50% is legal. Not sure how this will be policed, unless Raps/Jays resale sites and StubHub will not allow tickets to be posted which are above face + 50%.

I'd also like to see a crackdown on Raps season ticket holders with a dozen seats or more, which they sell off as a side business.

My problem isn't with the secondary market. It's with the team quietly double dipping by profiting from tickets being sold twice. That's not an ethical revenue stream.

JaysRule15 wrote:My problem isn't with the secondary market. It's with the team quietly double dipping by profiting from tickets being sold twice. That's not an ethical revenue stream.

Why shouldn't they get some of the profit? it's only a small percentage, anyway, and they're facilitating the sales. The majority of the profit on secondary market ticket sales goes to scalpers. People have such a simplistic, short-sighted take on this situation.

Didn't the team complain about the secondary market in a pre-season interview in terms of raising ticket prices? How do they get to complain about it and also benefit at the same time?

Seems counter-intuitive to me.

youreachiteach wrote:Didn't the team complain about the secondary market in a pre-season interview in terms of raising ticket prices? How do they get to complain about it and also benefit at the same time?

Seems counter-intuitive to me.

You can dislike the rules of a system, and still follow those rules. They seem to not like the convoluted way that they have been going about it. So instead of charging so little for the premium tickets that there's significant incentive to re-sell on StubHub even with the seller/buyer fees, they're raising those prices so only the people who want to use the tickets buy them in the first place. Dynamic pricing. They inherited a clunky system from the previous regime which they have been changing. They'll still leave the option to sell on StubHub, because it's a super-easy way for STH to sell tickets they can't use, even up to the last minute.

youreachiteach wrote:Didn't the team complain about the secondary market in a pre-season interview in terms of raising ticket prices? How do they get to complain about it and also benefit at the same time?

Seems counter-intuitive to me.

This is my only issue with it. Part of the logic for raising tickets was that "the secondary market pays this much so we should charge closer to that" but if you're already gaining from the secondary market why complain?

Raptor_Guy wrote:This is my only issue with it. Part of the logic for raising tickets was that "the secondary market pays this much so we should charge closer to that" but if you're already gaining from the secondary market why complain?

In reality, they'd rather that secondary market not be there. Ideally, they'd much rather be able to sell every ticket for the maximum possible value but having fluctuating prices at all times. The problem with that is that consumers often have trouble reconciling paying more than the next guy for the same product from the same company. Meanwhile, those same expectations of equality are out the door. It's only natural for bigger companies to want to find ways to circumvent that expectation that everyone gets treated the same, because it means that those who drive the hardest bargain set the standard for everyone. This is purely that. If people weren't willing to pay more than face value of the tickets at a later date from a 3rd party seller, this kind of arrangement simply wouldn't exist.