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As any good comic book nerd will tell you, the only thing worse than a villain terrorizing citizens is when multiple villains team up to do so. Thankfully, that only happens in comic books and movies … right? Well apparently Fanatics and Ticketmaster didn’t get the memo.
The two industry giants, who have managed to ruin both the sports apparel and ticketing industries, introduced a partnership on Wednesday according to Eben Novy-Williams of Sportico. Because if it wasn’t already extremely aggravating trying to find tickets to see your favorite teams, it will be now!
“Michael Rubin’s company has partnered with Ticketmaster to create the Fanatics Ticket Marketplace, where users on the Fanatics app can now buy resale tickets alongside apparel, merchandise, trading cards and collectibles,” Novy-Williams reports. “The deal is part of a wider two-way partnership between Fanatics and the Live Nation unit, whereby Ticketmaster tickets list via Fanatics, and Fanatics merchandise lists via Ticketmaster.”
That alone doesn’t sound too bad! But there’s seemingly always a catch with both Fanatics and Ticketmaster. So there’s no reason to believe there won’t be one this time around. These days, Fanatics more or less has a monopoly on sports merchandise despite its continued inability to deliver a quality product in a timely manner. Ticketmaster, meanwhile, gouges users with insane fees while also failing to actually deliver face value tickets to anyone other than scalpers and bots, which led to U.S. congress stepping in and trying to fix the extremely broken ticketing industry.
Nevertheless, the two sides plan on moving forward with their disgusting partnership, and Fanatics execs are already seeing dollar signs.
“When you look at the market position that Ticketmaster has built—we wanted to make sure we had as broad and comprehensive an offering as we could,” Fanatics chief strategy and growth officer Tucker Kain said “Plus, having Ticketmaster/Live Nation as a potential partner across a number of things, like distributing our merchandise [through them], there’s an opportunity to start here and build a bigger partnership over time.”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear any superheroes are showing up to save the day this time around.