Junfu Han/Detroit Free Press / USA TODAY NETWORK
It’s hard to have much sympathy for ticket scalpers who only purchase them in the hopes of making a profit while making it harder for real fans to attend an event at a reasonable price. That’s certainly the case with one man who somehow had 164 season ticket accounts for Michigan football games who has filed a massive lawsuit against the school after it caught on.
Ticket scalpers are arguably a necessary evil and a natural byproduct of capitalism that offer one of the purest lessons in the law of supply and demand you’re ever going to get.
They do provide a valuable service for legitimate fans who are willing (and able) to pay more than face value to attend an event after missing out on the initial run of tickets, and while there are some situations where you can actually benefit from someone forced to sell theirs at a loss, scalpers essentially exist to take advantage of higher prices on the secondary market.
That opportunity serves as the basis for Maxim Tickets, Inc., a North Carolina-based company owned and operated by a man named Kevin Brick who had spent decades buying and reselling tickets to football games at the University of Michigan.
According to MLive, Brick is suing the school after it instituted a new policy that prevents season ticket holders from purchasing them for the sole purpose of reselling them in addition to limiting each person to a total of eight accounts.
According to the lawsuit, Brick had a whopping 164 accounts in his name and donated millions of dollars to the school to reap the benefits of the Priority Points linked to preferred seating options before the university informed him it was locking his access in 2024 due to violations of rules he claims weren’t disclosed.
The filing argues Michigan “unilaterally changed its terms and conditions without (our) consent or knowledge” in regard to a policy that initially permitted the resale of tickets and allowed them to be purchased solely for that purpose before the second practice was banned ahead of the start of the 2023 season.
Brick said he spent more than 20 years doing exactly that while operating under the impression there was no way the school would be able to change its rules to prevent him from doing so and claims the new policy was not mentioned in an email that was sent to season ticket holders before the change was instituted.
He initially filed the lawsuit in federal court last year before being informed it needed to be heard in the state and is seeking $2 million in damage while predicting he’ll be losing between $2.5 and $3.5 million in revenue each year as a result.