Over the last few years, West ham have encouraged those of us who can’t make a home game to use ticket exchange. For those of you that are unaware, ticket exchange is where you basically list your ticket on the club’s website for resale. If successfully purchased, the club will then add money into your account to be used either for your season ticket next year, away tickets or to be used in the shop. You never get any actual cash back. For utilising the system, the club will charge 10% purely for admin fees and other costs. This system removes season ticket holders selling them on any inflated resale website. When placing your tickets for resale, the club will actually tell you how much you will receive in club cash after they’ve taken their admin fee. However, not all is quite rosy in the West Ham garden regarding this system and I wonder if anybody previously has ever checked exactly what they get back if their ticket is sold? I read an article towards the end of last season where somebody stated that when using ticket exchange, you will get 90% back in club cash.
A £70 Shortfall in Club Cash
Last season was a difficult one for myself and my daughter. Although able to attend quite a few away games, due to distance and family circumstances, it meant that my daughter didn’t attend a single home game and I only attended one. I therefore assumed that my daughter‘s ticket for next season would cost a certain amount. Her season ticket for last year cost £790. Having successfully sold her ticket for every home game through ticket trade, I fully expected her season ticket for this coming season to be £711. This falls in line with a 10% reduction taken by the club for an admin fee of £79. However, imagine my surprise when I checked her club cash total to find she had a shortfall of almost £70. On calculating the return, it seemed that she only received 82% back for selling her ticket. I was fortunate to attend one game but even then when I looked at my own club cash, I also identified a similar shortfall of a round about 8%, how could this be?
Unanswered Questions and Terms & Conditions
Section 4.2 of the Ticket Exchange T&Cs says: ‘The Seller’s Amount shall be equal to 90% of the proportion of the price paid by the Seller, for their season ticket, which is attributable by the Club to that Match where the Ticket is made available for sale generally, and 90% where the Seller has nominated the person to whom they wish to sell the Ticket. The difference between the Price and the Seller’s Amount shall be retained by us as an administrative charge in acting as agent.” This is taken from the club’s website article. I noticed this with one game to go, Nottingham Forest. It basically meant that if we sold our tickets back to the club through ticket exchange that ticket for the final league game was going to be worth over £100 which clearly was not right. And so to clarify matters I decided to trawl my account history to identify exactly how much we had received per game, the results were as follows:
Aston Villa £44 Man City £53.50 Ipswich £20 Chelsea £53.50 Ma United £44 Everton £31.50 Arsenal £44 Liverpool £53.50 Wolves £20 Brighton £31.50 Palace £20 Fulham £31.50 Brentford £20 Leicester £20 Newcastle £31.50 Southampton £20 Bournemouth £31.50 Tottenham £44 The variances were obviously dependent on where the club saw each team and in which category they placed them. So, assuming another £31.50 for Nottingham Forest game too as it is Cat B, it added up to £644.50 for 19 games. Our tickets were in season ticket Band 3 so £790 each. The expectation in line with the club’s terms and condition was 90% return of £711. It appeared that we were exactly £66.50 short of what the terms and conditions claim.
Investigating the Categorisation Discrepancy
With this information, I contacted the person who had written the article on Claret and Hugh website and on my behalf, he contacted the Ticket Office as he had direct contact with those higher up in that department. Feedback was that it would be investigated and they asked for further information including mine and my Daughter’s reference numbers so they could check. Two weeks later there was no update and so once more I messaged my contact who again chased this up. It was interesting to note that another fan group had also identified this but again they had hit a brick wall when questioning why the club was potentially taking money from fans without them knowing. I was told once more that I would be contacted by the weekend. The weekend passed and there was no contact at all.
The Club’s Admission and Delayed Resolution
I finally got a phone call completely out of the blue from an unknown number. It was the Ticket Office who said that they had identified that I was one of just a handful of people who had been given the incorrect amount during ticket exchange. I asked how many people had been contacted. I was told they were in the process of contacting everyone that had been affected. I assumed this could reach into the thousands and I wondered how on earth they would be able to phone so many people. The reason I believe this was the explanation I was given by the Ticket Office in that they had during the season re-categorise certain games, but had not altered the amount of money that we would receive. I was one of a few they told me that had sold their ticket for every game and they calculated that I was due over £60 in back credit. I was offered the opportunity to receive that immediately or after the season ended and put it into my club cash. I chose the latter as I wanted to use the amount I had to renew my season ticket in the hope that I would be able to attend more often next season. This they agreed to do.
Was This a Widespread Error?
However, they failed to answer the question of how many others may have lost money. It was easy for me to identify due to the amount of game tickets I had needed to sell but what did it mean to those who had sold individual games? Because if they had altered the category then that would have affected all who would sold their tickets back to the club in those category games. They couldn’t answer this. I was told I would get a call back the Tuesday after the last game of the season. By the end of play on Tuesday, I had received no contact from the ticket office and so I phoned. I was, after explaining the situation, put through to a manager. I again explained that I was awaiting a call back from a particular person whose name I told her. I was told he was working from home but would ring me. I then got a call back to tell me that I would receive a call again on Wednesday. This actually happened. I had prepared for the conversation, after all, my daughter’s ticket was an easy one, a 10% admin reduction meant that her ticket should cost £711. As for my ticket, I had attended the Nottingham Forest game and as it was a category C game it meant that I should have in my club cash £679.50. But nothing is easy with West Ham, his computer had come up with a different figure for each of us. I ended up getting him a little confused and in the end, he went with my figures and didn’t even charge me a booking fee. So we got there in the end but the question remains was the two of us, my daughter and me, the only one to get this sorted?
The Cost of a Simple Mistake
I had been informed that we were part of a handful of people that had been identified as being short changed. But this doesn’t hold up. The club has a set categorisation for games. The categorisation then gives a total available through ticket trader for each game which of course should add up to 90% of the total season ticket. If they had re-categoried games during the season then this means that anyone who has sold tickets in that category that had been changed would’ve been short changed. It is pretty clear that for the full season there was only a 8% variance and for myself and my daughter this worked out at £135. This was a large sum to me but not necessarily to the club. However if, for example, 10% of people utilised ticket exchange on any given game there is a potential that 6,000 people may have been underpaid even if this was only £5 per game, this is still £3,000 the club would have received without anyone noticing. If this discrepancy over 10 games that’s approximately £30,000 the club owes to season ticket holders. Most season ticket holders would be completely unaware of this discrepancy or that indeed the club owes them money and no doubt they never will. The fact of the matter is that once again there’s no transparency.
Advice for Season Ticket Holders: Check Your Return
It would be a simple process for the club to confirm prior to the season how much exactly an individual would receive for each category game or in fact for each opponent. This lack of visibility means though most people who only sell one or two tickets would be none the wiser. As this issue has seemingly been pushed under the carpet, I wonder if it was a one-season error or has it been going on over several seasons? I guess we will never know. It should be easy to work out how much comes back per category. But one thing I would advise anyone who uses ticket trader this coming season is to check what you get and make sure you get the right amount of money back per game. As an added foot note, it is possible that the club may change the whole policy around ticket trader. There are different variances throughout the Premier League. Certain clubs give 100% back without charging an admin fee. Some clubs state you must attend a certain amount of games to retain your season ticket. Other clubs will actually pay the money back to you rather than keep it in the club cash system. So West Ham could change how they manage this system. However it is my assumption that because we have already signed up for our season tickets this year, they cannot do it at this moment in time, but watch this space as you never know with this club just what they are doing or how much they may be saving. It’s not a case of ‘buyer before’ but just maybe ‘seller beware’. The club came good for me and my daughter in the end and maybe it was a genuine mistake. The club employees I spoke to on the phone were helpful and attentive and clearly wanted to make right the errors I had identified. But would the club have identified this error if it had not been brought to their attention? Well I guess we will never know.
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