Owners of highly prized debenture seats at Wimbledon are reselling hundreds of tickets every year via resale sites such as Viagogo to tennis fans who may have no idea where they will end up sitting or who they are buying from.
Analysis by the Guardian found that debenture seats, which cost £80,000 for a five-year period, are being sold for thousands of pounds per match.
Some of the listings, including for the ladies’ and men’s finals on Centre Court, display no seat numbers, making it impossible for buyers to know what they’re paying for.
The Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) said earlier this week it was seeking to find Viagogo in contempt of court for alleged repeated breaches of a court order the regulator obtained against the company last year, including failure to provide seat numbers.
But Viagogo said it was not obliged to provide such information for Wimbledon because even though seat numbers have now been allocated, they had not been when the tickets were issued to debenture holders and listed on its website.
However, similar listings on rival StubHub do include seat numbers.
The CMA’s court order also requires Viagogo to provide accurate information on the person selling the ticket, so they can contact the seller in case of any problem.
But sellers’ details attached to listings seen by the Guardian include one with a postcode that does not match the given address and another with a generic company name that appears to have no connection to the given address, a PO Box in Amsterdam.
Viagogo only publishes information of sellers whom it designates traders, another condition of the court order from the CMA. Traders are defined as people who sell at least 100 tickets a year, indicating debenture holders are selling Wimbledon seats – and potentially access to other events – in large volumes.
The All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, which oversees Wimbledon, said it had no objection to debenture holders selling their seats for profit.
It said the sale of debentures helped raise money to improve Wimbledon’s facilities and keep down prices for ordinary fans. Other than debentures, it does not permit resale. But it added that any listings that did not include information required under consumer law was a matter for the websites advertising the tickets.
“We note that […] the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is now moving forward with legal proceedings for contempt of court against Viagogo because it remains non-compliant with the order requiring an improvement in the information displayed about the tickets listed for resale on its site.
“Wimbledon and other event organisers were at the forefront of the campaign to introduce greater consumer protection for customers of secondary ticket platforms that led to the provisions being introduced by parliament, and the AELTC is fully supportive of the CMA enforcing the law in this area in order to give greater protections for the public.”
A spokeswoman for Wimbledon Debenture Holders, another conduit for debenture owners to sell their seats, warned that consumers using rival resale sites were putting themselves at risk.
“We only sell tickets that we actually have,” she said. “The other places take the money up front, say you’ve got a seat in a good position and you might find that you’re right up in the gods.”
“We tell the customer the block and location and only then is the transaction confirmed.”
The Guardian has approached Viagogo for comment.
