After deliberations between Bayern Munich’s top officials, the club have made the decision that they are going to be switching to digital only tickets for home matches at the Allianz Arena from next season onward. There will be no more physical, paper tickets at the home of the German Rekordmeister.
A big part of the reason why the club has decided to move in this direction is to greatly reduce the susceptibility for tickets to be subject to scammers trying to exploit paying fans via ticket resale platforms at significantly over-inflated prices, similar to what’s been seen at the World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico. It also offers protection against counterfeit tickets being produced and sold en masse to innocent fans trying to purchase tickets.
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Many sporting venues across the world already made this switch while the coronavirus pandemic was still at large, but when fans were slowly being reintroduced to venues. At the time, digital only tickets were a solution to preventing the spread of human-to-human contact of physical currency and potentially spreading the virus on a large scale at places like sporting events. While that was a widely-adopted concept and can still help in that regard, Bayern’s decision to switch to only digital ticket distribution for Allianz Arena matches was more so brought about to combat the black market of forgery, scamming, and counterfitting.
“With this change, FC Bayern, as a pioneer in club football, will also take a big step towards security against counterfeiting in ticket forwarding and actively fight the black market,” Bayern CEO Jan-Christian Dreesen explained at the recent summer meeting of the Fan Dialogue Working Group (kicker).
For match goers, purchased tickets will only be sent to the buyers via the FC Bayern app or Allianz Arena app, which has come with its own set of concerns from portions of supporter’s groups. Not everyone has access to a smartphone or has the necessary means to use the designated applications to purchase and carry their digital tickets, and large ticket packages are often made by registered supporters’ groups through the club. These are all concerns that are being addressed by the club, as Dreesen confirmed. “We are taking our members and fan clubs with us in the introduction of digital tickets and supporting them wherever necessary. Technical solutions have been developed specifically for our fan clubs in particular to facilitate digital forwarding to the numerous fan club members who travel to our home games by fan buses,” he stressed.
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