ESPN - The New York Yankees announced Monday morning that they are transferring their resale business, Yankees Ticket Exchange, to StubHub, which will take over for Ticketmaster as the team's new fan-to-fan ticket exchange.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the business is believed to be worth more than $100 million to the Yankees over the term of the contract.
"We are committed to providing our fans with a first-class ticket experience, and offering the safest, most secure and efficient platform for our fans to sell and purchase tickets," Yankees president Randy Levine said in a statement. "This new product was the result of many productive discussions with StubHub, which will allow them to fully integrate into our ticket system. We are confident this collaboration will best protect our fans in the resale ticket marketplace."
The deal brings to an end a long battle between the team and StubHub, which began in 2012 when the Yankees were one of two teams -- along with the Los Angeles Angels -- to opt out of Major League Baseball's deal to renew StubHub's role as the league's official secondary ticket market.
"The New York Yankees are one of the preeminent brands in professional sports, and we are thrilled to join with them to create a best-in-class fan experience," StubHub president Scott Cutler said in a statement. "StubHub's goal is to ensure that fans have access to games that they love to attend, and I'd like to thank both the Yankees and MLB Advanced Media for their willingness to come to the table and reach a positive solution for all parties."
This change also ends the influence of a controversial move that the Yankees and Ticketmaster made at the start at the season, when they banned print-at-home ticketing and PDFs in favor of mobile transfers.
The public reasoning for doing so was to help prevent fraud, as PDFs can be printed many times, and if multiple people had copies of the same ticket, the first person to scan a copy of a PDF would get in while the others were denied. But the move also benefited Ticketmaster, since StubHub could not carry out mobile transfers because it didn't have access to the tickets' bar codes -- only the team's official partner, which at the time was Ticketmaster, has access to the codes.
What this meant was that if someone wanted to sell a ticket on StubHub, they had to bring it to StubHub's office near Yankee Stadium by the day of the game at the latest. It was an inconvenience at best for a business that has become known for its ease of use.
Fans who bought the tickets also had to go to a StubHub office more than a half-mile away from Yankee Stadium to pick them up.
The deal will close that StubHub office, but it is not yet known how the new arrangement, which will begin after the All-Star Game, will work.
What does this actually mean for Yankee fans? As of right now, nothing. It's unclear exactly what the logistics of this deal are. Are the price floors that were implemented through the Yankees Ticket Exchange going to remain now that StubHub's reportedly shelled out $100 million for the rights to the team? It's unclear. But right now there's nothing more convenient about using StubHub versus YTE. You still can't use print-at-home tickets. You still have to depend on the technology of mobile ticket scanners. If anything it inconveniences everyone who's already been buying/selling with YTE cause now they have to pick up and move everything while they start a new life with StubHub.
I suppose in the future there's a chance there'll be a StubHub office somewhere at or in the very near vicinity of Yankee Stadium where you can pick up hard-stock tickets, but that's also cumbersome. The best part of StubHub, the thing that got it off the map for Yankee fans was being able to print out $2 dollar tickets an hour and a half before first pitch and you still can't do either of those things anymore so none of this really matters to me at all.
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