Is the new Ticket Share policy fair?

Towards the end of last season, Tottenham Hotspur announced a price freeze on Season Tickets. Buried beneath that headline, however, was a raft of changes to ticketing terms and conditions. Most slipped under the radar – and who can blame anyone for not combing through the small print? Football is supposed to be fun, not admin.

Since then, some of those measures have been reversed – notably the ill-judged removal of the Gold Automatic Cup Scheme, a move that was scrapped after a significant backlash. But others remain in place and, as the new season looms, one in particular is about to bite.

Ticket Share is no longer free. Previously, Season Ticket Holders could transfer a ticket to anyone with a free Club account. Now, they can only send it to someone who’s paid for a One Hotspur Membership.

This change raises serious questions about fairness, practicality and whether it even addresses the issues it’s meant to fix.

The Context

Spurs have more than 42,000 Season Ticket Holders, around 8,000 Premium members and an average of 3,000 away supporters in a stadium that holds 62,850 for league games. The Club doesn’t disclose how many One Hotspur Members (OHMs) it has – for “commercial reasons” – but we know there were over 100,000 in 2019, and that figure has almost certainly grown since.

For context, there are roughly 8-9,000 tickets available to OHMs at primary sale for each Premier League match, plus another 7-8,000 tickets moving through Ticket Exchange. Membership costs £45 for a basic adult OHM or £55 for OHM+, and provides access to ticket sales windows and Ticket Exchange, where Season Ticket Holders can resell tickets they can’t use.

Given that over half of all league games are moved from their traditional 3pm Saturday slot for television – and even more thanks to European commitments – flexibility is crucial for Season Ticket Holders. Until now, they had two main options: Ticket Exchange, for resale, and Ticket Share, for gifting tickets to friends or family with a free account.

Why Has the Club Done This?

The Club hasn’t given a clear reason for scrapping free transfers but has hinted at two motives: to make the system “fairer” for OHMs who don’t have Season Ticket Holder mates, and to clamp down on away fans getting into home sections. The Supporters’ Trust’s report of a recent ticketing meeting published on 14 July said that the move was “intended to combat ticket touting”, so presumably this was another reason the Club put forward.

Is It Really Fairer?

The theory is that if STHs used Ticket Share exclusively for friends and family, no tickets would appear on Ticket Exchange, which disadvantages OHMs. But that’s never been the case. STH’s use both Ticket Share and Exchange to move tickets on, with tickets regularly going unsold on Exchange – including some of ours.

In theory, there could be a world in which there’d be no tickets on either platform because every STH would make every match. That hasn’t happened either, and it never will.

What will happen is an influx of new OHMs, making competition for primary sales even fiercer. And let’s be clear: an OHM membership guarantees access to sales windows, not actual tickets. There’s no quota in the terms and conditions.

The new policy also makes it much harder for concessions to move tickets on via Ticket Share because adult recipients will now have to pay the OHM membership fee plus the difference in ticket price. Remember there are no concessions whatsoever on Ticket Exchange – for Juniors, Young Adults or Seniors. With the discontinuation of Senior One Hotspur Memberships a few years ago, this move will really hit our older fans in the pocket, and penalise parents and guardians hoping to introduce their children to Spurs without taking out a second mortgage, too.

Will It Stop Away Fans in Home Areas?

Hardly. Determined away fans are resourceful. Remember Spurs fans buying Newcastle memberships for the final game of 2015/16? If you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way.

There’s no denying that sitting close to an away fan in a home area is irritating at best and can ruin your match day experience at worse. But there are smarter ways to manage the problem. For example, the Club could set more membership deadlines ahead of games or come down far harder on STHs caught passing tickets to away fans.

These approaches take effort. Blanket policies do not.

Will it stop touting?

This depends on who the Club thinks are the touts: the recipients of tickets or the Season Ticket holders moving their tickets on via Ticket Share.

If it’s the latter, then there is a small chance it might make touting slightly more difficult, because a customer will theoretically have to be a paid member. But, again, if fans are prepared to pay well over the odds to a tout, then they will be prepared to pay £45 for a membership.

There’s also the option of using burner phones – something those involved in touting will already be extremely aware of. And screen shots, of course.

Remember that Spurs more than doubled the number of Season Ticket holders when they moved to Wembley, and arrived at the new stadium with 42,000 when there had been 18,500 at the old White Hart Lane. There is more than a fair chance some of those Season Tickets are held by people who bought them as an investment to sell on for inflated prices. The Club was happy to take their money, but if it now has an issue with them, it is possible to examine the pattern of ticket transfers and identify any suspicious activity that looks like touting. Again, it involves some effort.

If the Club considers some of the recipients to be touts, then they will continue to adopt the same methods they have been using to date as any further transfer of tickets once gifted via Ticket Share are prohibited via official channels.

Adopting any of the measures we suggest below would be more effective in stopping touting, and cause less damage to genuine fans.

A Cash Grab?

In the short term, yes. The Club will pocket more membership revenue. But long term? It risks damaging the matchday experience and alienating future fans.

The Consequences

The reality is that the vast majority of STHs who use the Ticket Share facility do so to pass tickets to their kids, parents, other family members or close friends when they genuinely can’t make a game. By being able to transfer tickets to these tight networks, they enable children to experience their first games; they enable the fan base to organically grow through the very communities on which our club is built. They enable access to games to those who struggle to pay the extortionate prices at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

All of these are to the long-term benefit of the Club. By forcing parents, kids, uncles and aunts to pay for memberships, THFC is effectively closing that entry door to many potential future fans. It’s short-sighted, crass and damaging to the future composition of the fan base.

The atmosphere will likely suffer, given the breaking of communities and familial ties. And the issues the Club are purportedly trying to fix are magnified, not resolved.

Ironically, the policy may even backfire. Fans will simply screenshot tickets and share them anyway, which means the Club loses visibility of who’s in the ground. And away fans? They’ll still find a way in. The supposed problem remains.

There’s a Better Way

The Club could have taken a measured approach. Limit the number of named contacts per Season Ticket Holder and lock them in before the season starts. Cap the number of free transfers allowed. And punish anyone proven to have passed a ticket to an away supporter with suspension or removal of their Season Tickets. These solutions balance access for OHMs, address the away fans issue, tackle touting and simultaneously protect family networks and communities.

Most of all, the Club could and should have had a genuine discussion – not a briefing about a decision already made – with its Fan Advisory Board and Supporters’ Trust about this. This would have set out what the intention of the changes was, considered consequences and jointly agreed workable and acceptable solutions. It would have avoided the fiasco over withdrawing the Gold membership and could potentially have resolved the long-running row over the unacceptable treatment of senior concessions, as well as come up with a better solution for Exchange and Share.

For that discussion to work properly, there needs to be will from the Club, and the willingness and ability to engage on detail from the FAB and the Trust.

Where Do Fans Stand?

We ran a poll on X. Of the 1,560 who voted in the 24 hours the poll ran for, 84% of fans were furious or annoyed at the change. Only 6% were happy with it, while 10% were not bothered.

If you’re in the 84%, make your voice heard. Email the Club at [email protected] and explain how this policy affects you.

The Club has committed to reviewing this policy after the first two home games of the new season, which conveniently will be after a lot of new memberships have been purchased. Let’s collectively try our best to move this decision forward.

Fans forced a rethink on the Gold Automatic Cup Scheme – we can do it again.

COYS

Kat Law, Martin Cloake & Anthoulla Achilleos
THFC Season Ticket Holders