2023-08-29

The potential of new technologies in today’s ticketing challenges.

The Champions League final, Real's incredible rout and spectacular Liverpool, who wouldn't want to see it live! It turned out that there were all too many takers, and unfortunately UEFA was not up to the task of organizing such an important event. Why did the match start more than half an hour late? What did the organizers not foresee, and how can this be remedied? How can modern technology support sports event organizers?

Willing to such an event as the final of the Champions League will never run out. Price or location do not play a role here, because fans of teams that often come to the end of the most important games in club football in spectacular circumstances simply have to be at such a match. The Champions League final was watched on TV by about 400 million people, and the stadium had “only” 80,000 seats. With the first announcement of the match being delayed, it became clear that there were organizational problems. The next shots showed the viewers where the problem lay … Fans jumping over the fence and playing school “bricklayer” with the security of the event, huge crowd and crowd in front of the entrances, blocked fire corridors and emergency exits. Was it possible to prevent all the chaos and the fact that in the end many people saw the match without tickets, and those who legally purchased their tickets were unable to reach the stadium?

What failed?

The cause of the confusion and scandal around the Champions League final is the phenomenon of the so-called. fake ticketing, i.e. (simply speaking) fraud and irregularities related to the distribution and resale of tickets for major events. What leads to this phenomenon?

– asymmetry of information: a person buying a second-hand ticket has no way to check whether the ticket they have purchased is valid and original. So everything is based on trust;

– duplication: a fan who has an admission ticket can easily copy the pass and sell it without any problems, e.g. in front of the stadium;

– possession of a ticket and its ownership: this is related to the previous point: if the ticket is not personal or it is simply not controlled, it is impossible to prove that you are the actual owner, so the first one to appear at automatic gates with a copy your ticket, he will be the only one to enter the stadium and will be considered the rightful owner;

– no control and no traceability of each ticket: once UEFA sells a ticket, it loses all control and visibility of what happens to it next, who then bought and sold it, and therefore it is impossible to determine the final owner.

How to combat these problems?

The answer to the problems of UEFA, as well as the organizers of other important sports events, may be technology in the form of Web 3.0. Third-generation Internet offers three options:

– issuing a pool of tickets as a numbered collection of NFT tokens. They would be tradable and transferable (at a predetermined price) and would contain fraud disincentives (licensing fees included in smart contracts), which would also generate revenue for UEFA;

– making tickets non-transferable. This is a more theoretical solution, because it involves the use of SBT, or soul-bound tokens, which work like game achievements, but instead of going to our avatar, they go to us and are non-transferable. However, SBT is still in development and may not be available until late 2022;

– use of ready-made and proven solutions based on NFT in ticketing. One of them is the GET protocol, i.e. the infrastructure for the digital operation of the ticketing system, which has already served over 420 events and processed over a million tickets, more than half of which are NFT tickets.

Summary

The source of the problem that arose on May 28 during the Champions League final was the impossibility of tracing the rightful owners of the tickets, which led to further chaos. The problem of fake ticketing keeps coming back and it’s time to do something about it. New technologies such as NFT, SBT or existing and already proven protocols are the answer. In addition to the possibilities offered by these solutions, they improve, accelerate and are a cheap alternative to the entire process of ticket sales and control. Particularly unique is the control, because the blockchain, which stores historical data on the ownership of a given token, would allow UEFA to track the entire path that the ticket travels, from its release on the market, to crossing the threshold of the stadium by its final buyer.

Udostępnij na:
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
WhatsApp
Ostatnie wpisy