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Notes -
I find that doubtful. This was almost certainly part of the original contract and the purchase was flagged for review due to purchase history.
Here's the relevant terms and conditions:
Presumably OP will be watching as a neutral. Is, "I am from a different country and just want to watch the game," not enough proof that he won't be supporting the other team?
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The purchaser specifically has to be, not just a non-scalper, but a fan? That's just unreasonable, IMO. But I guess there's no recourse.
There's evidently an issue where the home club expects a lot of away fans to show up for this particular game, and they don't want them dominating the home side of the stadium. I can understand why they don't want their stadium full of away fans, but it seems to me that warranting that you are a supporter of the team is one thing, but requiring proof before you enter is another. This isn't reasonable. I'm a long time fan of the Steelers, at least to the extent that I don't care about other teams, but I don't have any photos of me in Steelers gear. I own a ballcap I rarely wear, and a t-shirt that I do where but it's an obvious bootleg with the Grateful Dead skull and roses logo modified into a Steelers logo. I don't attend Steelers games or "events", unless you count watching games in a bar, and at that, it's not like people take pictures of my while I'm there. The only such photos I can think of are ones taken after the Penguins won the Stanley Cup, and that was in 2017. Hell, I went to Charlotte to watch Pitt in the ACC championship a few years ago (twice, actually), and I don't have any pictures from either trip. I don't know why they would expect their fans to have these pictures. It essentially means that buying the ticket isn't enough, and that there's an expectation that you buy their merchandise as well.
Yeah this is completely new. My brother has gone to many, many away games in the home end and has never seen this. I suspect it's because the club in question has a big reputation for violent fans and they don't want any of that to happen - and, let's be honest, they're not a club that really has to worry about tons of casual foreign fans or random tourists showing up.
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Glancing at a random team's terms, it looks like you can buy a home ticket only if you are a fan (§ 1.2) and you can buy an away ticket only if you are a fan (§ 5.1)—so a person who is a fan of neither team in a game just isn't allowed to buy tickets at all. Maybe @Bartender_Venator can point out this problem, assert that he is a fan of neither team, and beg to be let in on that basis.
The way this works in practice is that nobody ever checks anything - every big team's games have a bunch of international tourists who don't care about the teams but want to see a game while they're in England - but if you have any items from the wrong team on you (even wearing their colours), or if you celebrate the wrong team's goal, you get kicked out and maybe kicked a bit on your way out. I could potentially argue this, but I doubt it would fly given that this is a case of the club choosing to enforce a never-enforced policy.
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Doesn’t matter. If it’s not very clearly flagged in advance, such that he couldn’t have bought it without reasonably expecting this turn of events, then it’s not appropriate under UK law.
In general if a consumer would reasonably expect X, and not-X isn’t both clearly flagged and legally appropriate, and he has accumulated financial damage as a result, then the seller is up shit creek without a paddle. Doesn’t matter what the terms and conditions say. You can’t sign away your rights as a consumer in the UK, especially not three paragraphs into the small text.
@MadMonzer, do you have any thoughts? The above is true as far as I’m aware, and AI agrees.
I'm saying that it likely was clearly marked in advance. This isn't a new thing or something they're trying to trick people about.
People don't read disclaimers even when they're clear and require active consent.
Sorry, now I see what you mean.
That would make it more complex, certainly, though personally I doubt they did this. It seems a weird way of doing things in general and you’d expect them to demand this proof at buying time to prevent exactly this scenario.
The government is also aware that people don’t read disclaimers, and as a non-lawyer I would say that buying plane and hotel tickets signalled fairly clearly that Bartender expected to be able to get in. So I think even in that scenario he’d still have a decent chance.
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