Putting Fans at Risk

The remarkable events of Thursday night at The Emirates Stadium have been dissected across the media and yet no-one seems to have understood the situation. The more articles I have read about what happened the more frustrated I have become.

The vast majority of this coverage has centered on whether or not it was the fault of the Cologne fans with only a few pieces being more critical of police and the Clubs administrators. These, however, miss the point that actually given the current ticketing set up the event went as well as could be expected.

The failure of the system to properly put in place safeguards, to embrace modern technology and close gaping holes in ticketing and security mean that effectively all ticketed venues and their ticketing providers are putting fans and customers at risk.

Not just them. It could also be argued that the government has also failed to identify the inherent risks in the way things operate and has failed in its oversight role.

Whilst it seems odd that 20,000+ people can move from Koln to North London and not be noticed until they arrived. I would like to think that the police and border forces were well aware of what was happening and despite appearances were prepared for what was coming.

I may be wrong but as far as I can tell no Koln fan entered the stadium without a ticket. They didn't jump the fence en masse, they didn't replicate the Tube Yobs who slide in behind you to fool the system and they didn't force the security forces to open gates to flood the concourse. No, they simply showed up and bought tickets on the day (though why some felt it necessary to buy an arsenal shirt to buy from touts defeats me).

The stadium clearly would have been a third empty if the Koln fans didn't buy all those tickets. Remember it's likely a large number of those came from Arsenal fans, not just touts and secondary markets...so the teams' own fans are also partially to blame.

Yet as has been written here before the way ticketing is currently done there is no way of knowing who is actually coming to a venue with the ticket that was sold or if it was passed to friends, sold on to touts etc.

Arsenal is one of the best run commercial clubs in the world. The Emirates is a shining beacon of how a stadium can be operated and no doubt they have top of the range technology powering the system so it's hard to point to much fault at them, though perhaps they should be pushing their suppliers harder.

It's the ticketing companies who are ultimately at fault for what happened inside the stadium with away fans clearly taking over large portion or home allocation tickets (c.17,000 of them if the coverage I have seen is accurate). That is a massive failure of the available ticketing technology to provide the secure environment that is demanded in these type of events.

Whilst the 'Verified Fan' by Ticketmaster is a decent sign that more innovation is coming it's lucky that the Koln fans were more excited about having a good time supporting their team than making a scene. The poor stewards at the gates have no recourse but to allow holders of legitimate tickets in - and I am guessing were advised not to make a stand against the horde of Germans coming in on Arsenal fan tickets.

If only there was a working underlying technology that could link a ticket to an identifiable person, could limit resale prices or transferability, prevent touting and ensure that stadium operators and security personnel could track what was happening in their venues at any one time? If only someone could create something like the blockchain...

Sometimes change occurs when a spark provides the necessary catalyst. My sincere hope is that the threat exposed by the generally well-behaved Koln fans is the very moment that the UK and European venue operators begin to apply increased pressure on the ticketing suppliers to make the overhaul they need to...or go to a company that already has a working blockchain solution and replace the incumbents.

No technology is foolproof but what I have seen from the providers out there is that this new form of operating would certainly have prevented anything close to the scale of the event we saw on Thursday. Rather than knowing c.20% of the people in the stadium, they would have known more like c.90%.

Touts would have little incentive to sell on tickets as they would have limited upside - negating the need for cops to pretend to enforce the laws and focus on other issues - tickets transferred to people on watch lists could be automatically revoked and the sudden appearance of 17,000 German identities on home section tickets would have been seen, shut down and not allowed entry as the ticket would have been immediately voided. Yes, the stadium would have had no atmosphere but we wouldn't be debating about how close we were to a disaster.

In a day and age where security risks at major events are unfortunately routinely of a heightened level surely, this is the time to embrace the advances we have made and make sure that we learn our lessons before this happens again and things don't go so well.

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If you are interested ticketing blockchain solutions please contact me directly as whilst I am not involved in any I have researched the sector and can make some introductions where applicable.