Every year students will wake up at the crack of dawn with hopes of claiming their spot as a season ticket holder in one of many sports. But while most students have hearts full of virtue and Badger spirit, there are a select misguided few who only seek one thing: profit.
These students reap the rewards of ticket scalping, defined broadly as the resale of tickets for the admission to events.
While the idea of ticket scalping tends to carry a negative connotation, not all ticket scalping is illegal or bad. Wisconsin state law mandates that “no such ticket or other evidence of the right of entry may be sold for more than the price printed upon the face of the ticket.” This means it is perfectly acceptable to resell a ticket for the same price a person had originally purchased it for.
This is often the case for many students who want to sell their tickets because they simply can’t make it to a game due to academic pressures or other important callings. There is no problem with this. What I do have a problem with is the fact some students only sell their ticket for outrageous prices.
Both Wisconsin state statute and the UW contract states that when buying student tickets, it is illegal to sell tickets at a rate higher than the face value.
Football student season tickets are $188 for seven games, making each individual game worth $26.86 when divided equally. Some games may have more appeal than others making the value of each individual game vary, yet you will often find students trying to sell tickets for upwards of $50.
While this would seem to violate UW and state rules, there may be a loophole.
In regards to season tickets for every sport on campus, the tickets do not have a price printed on them. The tickets are in fact vouchers that students receive and exchange at the gate for tickets with section or seating assignments. Because there is no printed value on the vouchers, students could argue that they are not breaking the law.
The tickets students receive at the gate of basketball games do have a face value of $11 printed on them, same with men’s hockey at $12. But football tickets do not have any indication of face value on the ticket themselves. At that point it becomes difficult for police or the UW athletic department to enforce the scalping state statutes and the university ticket contract. While it is unclear if UW intentionally does this, it makes for a murky situation.
UW undergraduate enrollment is 29,580, while the student section at Camp Randall only holds 14,000. Of course not everyone at UW wants season tickets, but there is always high demand as the university has sold out of student season tickets for 22 consecutive seasons now. There are some that take advantage of this demand and will only buy season tickets to resell them at triple value immediately after purchase.
Those are the type of people that need to be dealt with. Students who intentionally rip off and take advantage of other Badgers do so every year and nothing has been done. Dan Wolski, a senior at UW, has been through the struggles of the scalping process and believes until the university steps up, this cycle of scalping is bound to continue.
“There are no repercussions for selling tickets above face value and until they [UW] enforce it, it’s going to continue,” Wolski said.
Ticket scalping at UW is a problem and will continue to be a problem until the university takes action against it. Every year students are denied a fair price to see the Badgers play because of the selfish acts of others. With only one semester left at UW, I won’t have to deal with the frustrations of season ticket buying, but can only hope things improve for future Badgers.
Ryan Smith ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in strategic communications.
