The Varsity Cup rugby season is in full swing across university campuses in South Africa. Monday nights have become a must-attend event, especially at the University of Pretoria where students and alumni bring the gees to back the Stripe Generation. With so much excitement in the air, one complaint rings true among students: ticket prices.
Varsity Cup tickets are sold on the UP Shop website for R45 – a pretty reasonable price considering other universities charge as much as R180 per ticket, per game. As soon as announcements are made on social media about ticket sales, the tickets are sold out. It seems as if there is more excitement for the games this year. If you could not grab a ticket quick enough, many student residences, societies, and organisations hand out free tickets to their members. Although numbers are limited, you generally have a pretty good shot at getting a ticket.
This year (more than others), it seems as though people are reselling tickets at extortionary prices in a practice formally called ticket touting. Simply put, ticket touting is the practice of buying tickets for an event and reselling them at a highly inflated price. This often happens for concerts, festivals, and now, Varsity Cup games.
Some ticket touters purchase tickets or obtain them from university-based organisations so that they can resell them at ridiculous mark-ups, with some tickets reselling for as high as R350. That is a 350% profit for a person who received the ticket for free.
PDBY recently spoke to a person who was a ticket reseller. In conversation, there was nothing sinister about why the tickets cost so much. It was just a student trying to make a quick, easy buck because they knew demand for tickets would be incredibly high.
On the students’ end, some feel exploited and deprived of a core cultural experience at the university. Many students can hear the games from their residence rooms but are unable to join in simply because they are not willing to pay the price. However, some students are willing to pay these prices so that they can be a part of this experience. These polarising opinions highlight a deeper inequality of access at the university and how seriously some students take such social events.
On 3 March, UP released a statement on their @tukssport Instagram account, urging students to refrain from ticket touting and condemning the act as it undermines fair access to sporting events. The statement highlighted the terms of Section 5(2) of the Safety at Sports and Recreational Activities Act (SASREA), which prohibits the practice.
Reporting suspected ticket fraud is encouraged and can be done by emailing ticket.fraud@hpc.co.za. As the university cracks down on the issue, it seems unlikely that ticket touting will come to an end. As long as students are willing to pay, there will always be a ticket touter ready to sell you a R300 ticket on Instagram.
Visual: Mpho Makwela
