Ticket Touts Still Operate At Anfield Despite The New Ticketing System
The first thing that it is worth saying is that you should not give ticket touts your money. Aside from the fact that you’ll end up massively over-paying, it is also very much the case that you can’t trust any of them. Touts are only bothered about getting money, not whether or not you have an amazing experience getting into Anfield to see the Reds play football.
It is just as likely that you will end up with a fake ticket or no tickets at all that it is that you’ll be able to enter the ground and watch any given match. That being said, some people will feel as though they have no choice but to go to a tout in order to get a chance to see Liverpool play live. These days it isn’t even just Liverpool home games that matter too, with Anfield now a premier concert venue. Recently there was huge demand for tickets to Taylor Swift’s concert during her Eras tour where tickets were very hard to get.
Legitimised Touting
The reality of Liverpool Football Club in the modern era is that the club has effectively legalised touting in certain instances. We are obviously not talking about the blokes that hang around outside of Anfield before a match offering tickets, but rather the companies that the club has signed deals with in order to allow them to sell tickets.
Look closer to home, you make up these stupid criterias then rob a large chunk of tickets and magically they spawn in on tout websites
Livefootballtickets had 50 Luton aways before you even announced the ballot
Club are the biggest touts https://t.co/csBzvzJIx2— Will Bushell (@bushell_will) March 27, 2024
A ‘tout’ is defined as ‘someone who buys up tickets for an event in order to resell them at a profit’. With a lot of companies that the club works with directly, such as the likes of Expedia, they are doing exactly that, selling match tickets for an inflated fee, often including other things into the package.
Do the Club Want to Stop It?
There has been something of a concerted effort in recent years to stop ticket touts; at least that’s how it appears on the surface. Liverpool have moved over to Near Field Communication in order to enter the stadium, meaning that you need to have your ticket on a mobile phone in order to access Anfield. This is theoretically to make life much more difficult for the touts, even if that hasn’t happened in practice.
The reality is, though, that the club will be torn on how much they actually want to stop ticket touts from being able to operate. Sure, they will make out as if they desperately don’t want touting, but is that the reality?
Hey @LFC I’m tired of sitting next to 4 away fans EVERY GAME in the SKD. If you want crowd trouble in the hospitality areas just keep ignoring the away fans with tickets celebrating goals and chatting shit.
Its either LFC or touts selling these tickets. STOP IT !!!
— YNWA Kaiser (@YNWA_Kaiser) April 30, 2023
Someone who is willing to spend £200, say, to get a ticket for a Liverpool match is almost certainly going to be happy to also spend a large sum of money in the club shop. Once they get into the ground, which they will likely do quite early in order to soak up the atmosphere, they will buy a match day programme and head to the concession stand in order to buy some food and drinks.
That is all money that goes straight into the club’s accounts and, more importantly, money that they almost certainly wouldn’t get from the vast majority of locals. The truth is, most local fans will drink in a nearby pub and not spend a penny inside the stadium.
The Sorts of Things That the Touts Do
If you have decided that getting a ticket from a tout is the only way that you’ll be able to get tickets to a Liverpool match, the thing you’ll want to know is how, exactly, you go about doing so. In reality, it isn’t necessarily all that easy to tell you about, if for no other reason than a lot of touts are obviously quite secretive in how they operate. What we can do is give you a sense of how touts work and how you would go about using one to get a ticket for a match at Anfield.
One of the first places that you can look is on social media, with many people not being at all subtle about offering tickets there for inflated prices.
@jkl_jeril See me at L2 below the main stand #ticket #lfcmatch #livlei #carabaocup
If you’re going to do that then it is worth searching the username of the person offering the ticket to see if anyone is calling them out as a faker or a rip-off merchant. It isn’t unusual for people to point out that they tried to buy tickets from the person but ended up with nothing, so it is one of the only ways that you can go about trying to protect yourself.
If you are still willing to risk it then the person you’re dealing with will tell you how to go about getting your ticket, which will usually involve meeting up with them and getting a mobile phone from them, given you need to have an NFC pass in order to be able to get into Anfield.
Picking up Mobile Phones
Touts nowadays tend to operate in one of two ways when it comes to giving you your ticket: they will either give it to you outside of Anfield and then collect it from you inside the ground, or else they will ask you to collect it and drop it off somewhere before and after the game. There was one example of a tout that asked punters to turn up to a barbers’ shop close to the ground in order to pick up the mobile phone with the NFC pass loaded up onto it.
Once the person has collected the phone, they are told that they need to leave something behind like their passport or a sum of cash that they will definitely need to collect after full-time.
This is the tout’s way of guaranteeing that the punter will come back and give them back their phone with the NFC pass on it, safe for use at another time in the future. Obviously you should not leave anything with them that you’re not willing to lose, given the fact that these people are doing something illegal and therefore shouldn’t be trusted.
The reality is that anything that you leave in their control is just as liable to disappear as the touts themselves. Your belongings need to look as though they’re really important to you but not actually be, so the tout will trust you but if they rip you off then you won’t lose too much as a result.
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