The combination of a long legal battle against ticketing giant Viagogo, and feedback from consumers who have bought resale tickets has shown us just how bad things are in Europe’s failing ticketing market. 

Euroconsumers new position paper Sold Out. Priced Out is our roadmap for the resale market. It diagnoses the problems and sets out the solution: the Digital Fairness Act as the vehicle to drive fair treatment for every music, sport or culture fan in Europe who buys a ticket on the secondary market.

We want the Digital Fairness Act to instigate an EU-wide ban on reselling tickets above face value, platforms that are held accountable for their actions, enforcement that saves consumers millions of euros and stops ticket resale rip-offs. 

Read on for the headline harms, why the tricky jurisdictional jigsaw is holding back consumer justice, and how to fix it.

What goes wrong when consumers buy on the ticket resale market? 

Three primary harms are faced by consumers when they buy a ticket on a resale site:

Exposure to inflated prices

Consumers are exposed to inflated prices, through both resale markups and platform commission structures that can give intermediaries a direct financial stake in higher resale prices. In Italy, resale markups for 2026 Winter Olympic tickets reached 600% above face value.

On top of the increased ticket price, resale platforms add-on extras like service fees, transaction fees or organiser fees, with little obvious justification. 

Commission-based platform fees give resale sites a direct financial interest in higher markups on tickets, and a disincentive to enforce price caps on sellers. And, when national legislation caps what a reseller can charge, the platform is still free to add its own fees without limit.

No safeguards from fake or invalid tickets

Consumers have no reliable way to verify that a ticket they are purchasing is genuine, has not already been resold to another buyer or will even be honoured at the venue. Until there is proper traceability, tickets can be listed multiple times, cancelled by the primary seller, or voided entirely, and the new buyer left powerless. 

Zero accountability

At the moment, consumers have no rights to know a ticket’s original price, no way to verify a seller’s identity, or even whether they are a commercial seller or a private individual, no comfort from transacting on unregistered platforms operating in the EU with no obligations facing no practical consequences for their practices. 

How does Dynamic Pricing ramp up resale harms?

A further market development ramps up these harms to new levels. The World Cup made 2026 the year of dynamic pricing and football fans and governments woke up to the reality of applying demand-led pricing to a global event. 

The most expensive Final ticket available on Fifa’s primary platform was on sale at $10,990 compared to around $1,600 charged for the top priced ticket at 2022’s final in Qatar. 

If a 587% price rise over 4 years is not eyewatering enough, the secondary market run by Fifa had tickets listed for the final ranging from $8,970 to just under $11.5m.

The industry claims that dynamic pricing in primary markets dampens the incentive to resell, because if the primary seller captures the full market value, touts lose their margin. However, this misidentifies the real harm that needs to be addressed. 

Ticket buyers can suffer when the structure of primary and secondary markets align to push prices up to levels that could never be considered reasonable even in a constrained market, and especially when they give access to important cultural events.

Redistributing the excessive markup and related fees from a primary to a secondary marketplace doesn’t protect consumers, it simply changes which site makes money. 

In the case of Fifa, who ran both the primary and secondary sales platforms, the structural failures become clear:

Add in that the original price paid could have been pushed up through variable pricing and Fifa looks to have done very well out of both approaches. 

A primary market with demand-based pricing that has eroded the concept of a fixed “face value” for a ticket, in turn makes the secondary market harder to regulate. Price caps for secondary sellers need to be linked to a meaningful, fixed and visible face value. 

Euroconsumers kept up steady pressure with the authorities throughout the tournament with a joint call with Football Supporters Europe to the European Commission to stop the unfair pricing, by speaking out against dynamic pricing for live events and by closely monitoring where the most extreme ticket spikes were happening.

2026’s World Cup made it obvious that any effective policy framework for resale must either assume stable pricing in the primary market or jointly address the impact of variable pricing on secondary platforms. 

Why cross-border sales make regulating resale markets tough

Ticket resale is not an unregulated grey area across the European Union; it is one that is regulated differently across Europe.

Four of our five member countries prohibit ticket resale above face value which on the face of it looks positive.  In reality, national consumer authorities’ powers and scope are very different and they cannot systematically pursue operators outside their borders. 

Resale is regulated so inconsistently that the underlying, exploitative business models of ticket resale platforms are left untouched.

National laws that restrict resale are now being challenged on the grounds that they may themselves be incompatible with EU internal market rules (for example in Belgium where action taken on non-Belgium resellers has been referred to the CJEU). 

This produces a perverse outcome: member states that have sought to protect consumers may see their efforts invalidated by EU law if they are found to be incompatible with EU internal market rules.

The Digital Fairness Act can end secondary ticketing turmoil

The consumer protection framework for the EU has legislation (Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, Consumer Rights Directive and Digital Services Act) that provides a foundation for ticketing sales but leaves critical gaps where consumers suffer. 

A harmonised, cross‑border approach at EU level could resolve the gaps and inconsistencies that make national law ineffective and the Digital Fairness Act (DFA) is the obvious place to do that.  Euroconsumers wants the European Commission to include three binding measures in the Act:

A ban on the resale of tickets above the original face value 

• • The DFA should prohibit the resale of tickets above their original face value, with a narrow margin permitted to cover legitimate transaction costs such as real payment processing fees. 
  • The ban should apply to both business-to-consumer and consumer-to consumer resale. 
  • Any resale listings must display the original face value alongside the resale price, for full transparency.

Platform Accountability 

• • Platforms must enforce the face-value cap; display the original face value of every ticket prominently; verify the identity of sellers and the authenticity of tickets; and maintain full traceability of resale transactions to regulators on request. 
  • Platform fees charged in connection with a resale transaction, including service fees, transaction fees, and any other intermediary charges, must be clearly displayed from the point of first listing throughout the transaction process and must correspond to a genuine service rendered. 
  • National authorities should be empowered to investigate and sanction fees that are disproportionate or unjustified.

Effective Enforcement 

• • Fines for breaches must be calibrated to global annual turnover, not fixed amounts, and calculated according to clear and consistent criteria that can withstand judicial scrutiny. 
  • National regulators should be empowered to order website blocking for persistent non-compliance.
  • The UCPD already prohibits the commercial use of automated tools to bulk-acquire tickets but the primary ticketing platforms that fail to take reasonable steps to prevent their use are outside its scope. Penalties should apply to both the resellers operating AI-driven bots and the ticket platforms that do not act against them. 

The insights, analysis and recommendations reflect what our member organisations have encountered directly in courtrooms and in front of consumer enforcement authorities, in regulatory proceedings, and in the thousands of complaints received from consumers who paid far more than they should have for a ticket. 

After a decade of using national regulation, investigations, complaints and enforcement action across the secondary ticketing market to put things right for consumers, we know that they are not enough.  

We urge the Commission to seize the opportunity that the Digital Fairness Act brings. The time has come to establish binding EU-wide rules that ban above face-value resale backed by enforcement mechanisms that can reach the platforms and operators behind them.