With the Manly Sea Eagles beating the Bunnies earlier tonight (or yesterday depending on when this hits the website) it came to my attention that South Sydney fans cannot sell their overpriced, unwanted Grand Final tickets due to the NRL’s RIDICULOUS buyback policy.
For those who haven’t heard, the “buy back” policy is for those whose team is knocked out of the competition, they can sell their tickets back to the NRL through ticketek so that the tickets can then be on sold to fans of teams who qualified. The problem for Souths fans, who have reportedly bought the biggest majority of tickets of any club, is that the cut off for the buy back was before kick off in this game.
So this means 20,000 + Souths fans can no longer legally sell their tickets back for fans of Manly, and either The Roosters or Newcastle to purchase. The NRL are COMPLETELY shooting themselves in the foot here, as what do you think Souths fans will do now? They’ll put the tickets up at inflated prices on ebay, gumtree, etc etc, and who can blame them?
Souths fans are shafted, they now have tickets that fans of Melbourne and Cronulla were able to sell back to the NRL, and will unlikely want to head to a game their team is no longer playing in. Manly fans who want to purchase tickets now that their team has qualified will be forced to pay even more ridiculous prices from Ebay listings, as will Newcastle/Roosters fans.
Some will say “well if they wanted tickets they should have bought them earlier” … true, BUT if Newcastle qualify tomorrow, three weeks ago, no one would have given the Knights a real shot at making the big game so you can’t blame their fans for not spending big for tickets they’d likely have to sell on anyways.
The NRL will claim that it’s too difficult to on sell tickets with only a week’s notice … I bet Ebay doesn’t encounter that problem. Another horrible policy that will see fans either pay inflated prices, or miss out. Dave Smith, earn your million a year and step in.
For the record, Manly are going to be hard to stop now
