“It’s not what we want for the UK MMA fans” Dan Hardy on the UFC London ticket controversy

For a long time now there has been a problem when it comes to the purchasing of tickets through sites such as Ticketmaster, a problem that is probably felt by none more than UK fans of the UFC. Without fail you can be sure that the majority of tickets will be gone within seconds of them going live many of which end up on the resale market for hundreds more than their face value, leaving thousands of UK fans out of luck or out of pocket. At the time of writing this article, the cheapest ticket on the resale market I could find was priced at £348, almost £300 more than its original price. Baring in mind these are for the seats in the nose bleeds.

I spoke to UFC and British MMA legend Dan Hardy about the issue, he shared all of the same concerns and said “I’ve had messages all week from people, can I get tickets? where can I get tickets? and I’m like I couldn’t get tickets right now, I would be standing outside the O2 arena with you”. One of the problems is that there are no deterrents or safeguards in place to ensure that these tickets aren’t able to be overpriced on the resale market. Dan suggested that perhaps ID should be required alongside the tickets, or even printed with names and phone numbers “whatever the solution is, something needs to be done”. Hardy added, “the people making the profits at this stage isn’t the fighters and it’s not even the promoters”. “What we don’t want is hardcore MMA fans who have been following the sport for many many years to be paying 3 times the amount to put some money into the pocket of a ticket tout”