StubHub: Empowering the rich, extorting the common man

News about the arrival of a company called StubHub at Tottenham Hotspur Football Club would normally have gone straight under the radar, considering nobody had heard of them or would care that we had become associated with yet another company. Far f
rom it, the news of StubHub's arrival at the Lane has been heard across many of the regular match-goers. The reaction has not been positive.

I have been fully informed about what exactly StubHub does, its purposes and its consequences. StubHub are an eBay-esk ticket market, where season ticket holders can put up their tickets on open bid or on a set price and sell it to anyone (Spurs fans, neutrals, away fans etc). Selling your ticket requires no contact with the new recipient, apart from the exchange of money.

So what can we interpret from this?

Many people use eBay as a legitimate way of selling goods for profit. My mate used to do it and he earned a veritable mint out of the auction and buy-it-now system. I even considered doing it myself, but really didn't have the cash to get it up and running. StubHub, therefore, could be used in a similar sense to make money out of fellow fans. Say I had a season ticket, what does it cost, £1000? I could sell each of my £50 worth tickets for £60 or £70, maybe £100 for derbies, and across a season I could make a substantial profit. And it could all be done legitimately and according to the rules. I could leech off my fellow Spurs fans and not a single consideration would be given by StubHub. How does that make you feel?

What else?

So, say I put a £50 ticket on open auction. The ticket, like I said, would go to the highest bidder, the person with the most money to spend. If people weren't already being priced out of matches due to the extortion of current ticket prices, StubHub would enable more people to feel redundant and left to watch the match on a stream at home, alone. As a result, the Lane would be filled with more of a higher class of person, a person with a comfortable wealth.

Football is the common man's game, well, at least it is still that in our minds. We all as kids kicked around a deflated white ball in the playground, thinking we could all be the next Ronaldo (fat Ronaldo, always fat Ronaldo). We grow up, rid our selves of those dreams, and instead, put our faith that the pros playing the game could satisfy our childhood dreams in a way we could never do ourselves.

The wealthy man, the privileged man, has had his dreams met and is comfortable. Football fans should not be privileged like that. We are the discontented masses, perhaps unhappy by the cards we have dealt, but happy to spend all our emotions in a football ground and on the shirt we love. StubHub would empower the privileged, not the common man.

StubHub should not be allowed at football. Ticket touting is condemned by us football fans and should not be tolerated in any form. This is simply legitimized ticket touting. The owners have allowed StubHub to enter the club because they have been financially rewarded by them, only that.

Daniel Levy said on the final day of the 2012/13 season in an open letter to the fans that 'you [the supporters] are what this club is all about'. Bound by these words, he must listen to our protests, against this money-making company, existing only to empower the wealthy and extort the common man, and he must meet our demands.

Let us all remember, football without fans is nothing.