How Manchester United are trying to tackle touts

Manchester United has a major problem with ticket touts.

Club officials say it has led to intimidation and threats against staff.

Stories have been recounted of fans left in tears after discovering the seats they have bought for games at Old Trafford do not exist, having been sold by touts, sometimes multiple times.

For the Premier League game at Liverpool, it was discovered someone paid £900 for a ticket in the away section.

The resale of tickets is illegal in the UK but the same legislation does not apply to companies abroad.

The club is trying several approaches to combat the problem but their powers are limited and accept there are times when it appears the people they are trying to stop are one step ahead.

Additionally, as they have discovered, some of the actions they do take are met with fierce resistance from their own supporters.

Speaking to United staff earlier this month, the scale of the problem was laid bare.

In the past, a feature of an Old Trafford matchday were the people dotted around Sir Matt Busby way offering to sell tickets. But numbers have dwindled.

Now trading is done on Facebook or on WhatsApp groups and in a way that makes formal identification hard or impossible. Infiltration is incredibly difficult.

In the minutes of October's Fans Forum meeting, United said 2,000 tickets for the Premier League game with Chelsea on 20 September were "successfully reclaimed" and "over 4,500 active users were blocked" from buying tickets. The club believes the use of bots to purchase huge number of tickets under assumed names is the major problem.

On average, the club says, season ticket holders return between 5,000 and 7,500 tickets per game for "repurposing". They estimate between 10% and 15% of United's 47,000 season tickets are owned by touts, who take over tickets from holders who do not want to keep them. Valid addresses are no longer required because the tickets are delivered in digital form.

Around the first five home games of the season, United either blocked or cancelled 22,000 tickets, a figure the club regards as the "tip of the iceberg".

The club places checks on suspicious tickets that require fans to seek out officials at the ticket office at away games. From that, it was established that one fan paid £900 to for a ticket to see the win at Liverpool, another paid £800 for the 2-2 draw at Tottenham earlier this month.

With more tickets available, some of the scenes at Old Trafford can be upsetting as supporters discover they have been duped. For away matches, the ticket holders are allowed into the game. The source of the ticket is logged and action taken. At home, it is frequently not possible when tickets for the same seats are being sold multiple times.

Touting is big business. It is estimated it is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to those involved and is not restricted to Manchester United. The biggest northern clubs and all those in London are the main targets, with overseas supporters, willing to pay a premium to circumvent club ticketing policies they either have no knowledge of or whose criteria they do not meet.

At one point, Manchester United sent non-permanent staff out to buy tickets off the street. Within minutes, it became apparent those running the touting operation had worked out what was happening and demanded to know why. On-street ticket checks have led to verbal and physical threats.

The club feels it is starting to get across who exactly is in charge of its season tickets. Doing the same with a membership of around 500,000 - all members are able to apply for tickets - is impossible.

Tickets for corporate areas, which rarely sell out, have been reduced in price meaning paying inflated sums to touts is unnecessary.

Manchester United's club policy is that any ticket downloaded more than four times risks being blocked at the turnstile.

At Tottenham, where tickets for the away section were only available to season ticket holders who had also been to every home cup game in the 2024-25 season, 75 tickets were placed on a check. Twenty of those belonged to the right people, 35 were touted tickets and the rest did not return to the ticket office to get the situation rectified.

The club assumed those tickets had been touted and the 'owner' had been told to go elsewhere if there was a problem.

Some supporters have a different view. They argue there is no specific prior warning of potential ID checks and there is no legal requirement for fans to carry ID. Nor should club staff be demanding supporters open their phones as they have claimed happens, arguing this is a privacy breach and a data protection issue.

Given a significant number of United's away following tend to arrive at stadiums close to kick-off and knowing the time it is likely to take to sort the ticketing issue out, the counter view is that some fans opt to miss the game completely and find somewhere else to watch it instead.

In addition, there is suspicion among supporters about how much of the away allocation goes to executive ticket holders

The club has stopped the established precedent of publishing the percentages of which type of tickets make up each game's away allocation.

There is also a feeling that rules around forwarding tickets to other supporters is restrictive and stops fans helping each other out if they miss out in the ballot. United counter this by saying circumventing the rules just leads to a legitimate applicant missing out.

Some supporters also say the point before a game at which forwarding is no longer allowed does not take into account fans experiencing travel issues - a particular concern during the current run of five midweek night matches in a row at home.

A United source said: "We know these checks annoy some fans, but at the same time fans are telling us to do more to make sure away tickets are going to the fans who deserve them.

"We occasionally carry out targeted checks on a proportion of away tickets to make sure the ticket holder is who it is supposed to be. There are always some cases where tickets have been sold on at extortionate prices, ripping off the fans who buy them, and denying regular matchgoers a seat.

"Our away ticket allocations are always massively over-subscribed so we have a duty to ensure that tickets are ending up where they are supposed to - with our most loyal fans."

The Premier League does not sell tickets and league sources say ticket sales platforms, messaging and enforcement is primarily something clubs develop directly. However, the league does provide general guidance for supporters on safe ticket buying, publishes a list of known unauthorised ticket websites and urges fans to exercise extreme caution when dealing with these websites.