The voice of Scot Tobias, one of America's most successful ticket "brokers", boomed from the stage. After an hour of drinking and networking, his pitch was met with cheers by the room full of touts gathered in a subterranean events space in central London.
He was urging them to dip into their pockets to fund a common cause: the existential fight against Labour's pledge to limit how much a ticket for a concert, sports match or event can be resold for.
The UK touting industry, seen by many as the parasitic underbelly of the entertainment world, knows that if Labour follows through with its promised 10% cap on the value of resold tickets, their time is up. The solution, revealed the veteran British ticket trader Tony McGowen, was a counter-offensive, but one that would stay hush-hush.
Undercover filming by the Guardian at that closed-door event sheds light on the secret plan hatched by a lobbying group that calls itself the Coalition for Ticket Fairness (CTF), which hopes to derail the first ever concerted effort by politicians to stop touts exploiting fans at will.
Among the audience at the private dinner at the Underglobe on London's South Bank this month were touts from an array of backgrounds, as well as representatives of some of the biggest businesses in the sector.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May 29, 2024-Ausgabe von The Guardian.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May 29, 2024-Ausgabe von The Guardian.
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