Cricket Tickets: The National Sports Exchange (NSE)

Rewind to March 2011. Hundreds and thousands of fans were waiting for hours, moving around the stadium, desperate to get their hands on a ticket for the India vs Pakistan Cricket World Cup semi final. People were ready to pay Rs 25,000 for the cheapest ticket and the black marketeers thus made a killing. Black market ticketing is a rampant practice is a sports crazy nation where there are many such matches every year, most notably in cricket given the enthusiasm the public have for the sport. People from all walks of life, right from slums to metros, are all mad about cricket in India. With such interest in match tickets, it is imperative that a more efficient and transparent system needs to be in place.

Now imagine the simple idea of trading of match tickets just like security on the stock exchange, issue of an IPO of match tickets just as companies do, let the speculators ,buyer and sellers determine the prices, even start trading of futures contracts of important matches(where volumes would be high), there can be multiple benefits of this system few of the important benefits are listed below-

• No hassles for the consumer He/she can purchase tickets anytime online at a market driven price during the ticket trading period
• There will be no black market, there will only be speculators, just like in any other stock, playing the game of risks and returns (with no insider information)
• Significant revenues can be generated by adequately pricing the IPO for different matches
• There would be better transparency in ticket sales

Here’s an example of the system. As cricket fans would know, IPL tickets were priced at a minimum of Rs. 250-300. In many matches, seats in the stadia were empty because of various reasons: unimportant match, overdose of cricket etc. Now say, if these tickets were traded in the market, the prices can fall even as a low as Rs. 75-100 which means that even a poor rickshawala can manage to take his kids to watch cricket so that he can fulfill their dreams of watching their favourite players in action, a priceless feeling to a cricket enthusiast

India has the infrastructure and technical competency to make this idea a success and I am optimistic that things will change for good in this regard. Suggestions and comments are welcome.