Somewhere in your attendee list is a person who will arrive at your event without a working ticket. Not because they lost it, and not because they are trying anything clever. Their phone will be at 3%, or the ticket will be sitting in an inbox they cannot get into, or it was bought by a colleague who has since left the company. Your check-in desk decides in about eight seconds whether that person has a lovely morning or a humiliating one. New research out of Aston University suggests an entire sport has been quietly getting that decision wrong, at scale, for years.
The study, published on 11 August and led by Dr Danny Fitzpatrick, an expert in sport governance and football fan culture, argues that a combination of ticket price rises and increasingly restrictive digital ticketing systems is pushing long-standing supporters out of English football. As TheTicketingBusiness reported, the concerns cluster around affordability, inclusion, and how much control clubs now have over access through their own platforms. It is a football story on the surface. Underneath, it is a story about what happens when a ticket stops being a piece of paper and becomes an account.
What the research actually found
The pricing numbers are the headline grabbers. According to the write-up published by the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce, English football ticket prices rose by an estimated 800% between 1990 and 2025. Ahead of the 2024-25 season, 19 of the Premier League's 20 clubs put prices up, with some rises reaching 28%, and in one case a child's season ticket more than doubled. The average age of a Premier League matchday crowd was 41 the last time the league published the figure, back in 2012-13, and the researchers think reduced concessions for under-18s, students and over-65s will push it higher still.
The more interesting half of the research is the technology half. Clubs adopted digital ticketing largely to fight touts, and by their own account it has worked: organised resale networks are easier to spot when every ticket is tied to an identity. But the study found that automated detection systems struggle to tell industrial-scale touting apart from an entirely ordinary bit of life admin, such as a season ticket holder passing a seat to their daughter, or an older supporter who needs someone else to operate the app on their behalf. Supporters at clubs including Manchester United have faced restrictions, account suspensions and bans off the back of those reviews. What the interviewees objected to was not the enforcement so much as the opacity: nobody could see the rule they had broken, and there was no obvious way to argue.
A ticketing system that cannot tell a tout from a grandad has not solved fraud. It has just moved the cost of fraud onto the people least able to complain about it.
The deadline the coverage skipped
Here is the context that makes the timing pointed. This is not a warning about a trend that might arrive. Premier League clubs voted in August 2024 to make digital ticketing mandatory across the league, with a phased run-in that required at least 70% of home tickets to be digital, and full digital-only operation landing from the 2026/27 season. That season starts in a matter of days. Paper tickets, print-at-home and plastic cards are on their way out, and authorised resale is being funnelled through digital transfer only. Clubs retain discretion to issue other formats to supporters with reasonable grounds, including disabilities that make digital tickets difficult, and newly promoted clubs get a two-year grace period.
So the research is not landing in a vacuum. It is landing in the week the training wheels come off. Every edge case that was previously absorbed by a box office window and a laminating machine now has to be handled by software and by whoever is standing at the turnstile.
What this means for event organisers using QR code check-in
Very few conference organisers are running a 60,000 seat stadium, and almost none are fighting professional touts. But the mechanism that is causing football grief is exactly the mechanism sitting under most business events: the ticket is a record in a database, the record is bound to a person, and a scanner at the door enforces that binding without any capacity for judgement. That is fine right up until reality shows up.
Good QR code check-in is not really about scan speed. It is about how gracefully the system handles the cases it was not designed for. Here are the ones that actually happen, and what a sane setup does about each.
| What goes wrong at the door | What a well-built check-in flow does |
|---|---|
| Ticket bought by a PA or team admin for someone else | Lets the buyer reassign the attendee name before the event, without support tickets |
| Attendee cannot find the email or has a flat phone | Allows staff to search by name or company and check in manually in seconds |
| Venue wifi drops during peak arrivals | Scans offline and syncs when connectivity returns |
| Two people arrive with what looks like the same ticket | Flags it for a human rather than turning both away automatically |
| Delegate needs a printed pass for accessibility reasons | Offers a non-digital route as standard, not as a favour |
| Name badge is wrong because registration data changed | Prints from live data at the desk instead of a week-old export |
None of that is exotic. It is the difference between a check-in system built for the organiser's convenience and one built for the queue. Our own view on QR code check-in has always been that the scanner should be the fast path, never the only path, and that any member of your team should be able to override it without ringing a support line. If your platform treats a manual check-in as a suspicious act, you do not have a security feature. You have a bottleneck with opinions.
Watch this space
The football version of this argument will get louder before it gets quieter, because the 2026/27 season is the first real test of digital-only access at scale in England. Expect the first genuinely embarrassing case to arrive within weeks: a lifelong supporter locked out by an automated rule, a club with no appeal process worth the name, and a news cycle that treats it as a story about greed rather than a story about product design.
The read-across for business events is narrower but sharper. Registration data and access control are converging fast, and the same platforms now handle identity verification, badge printing and entry. Every one of those is a place where a rule can quietly become a barrier. The organisers who come out of this well will be the ones who write down, in advance, what happens when the system says no. Who can override it, how quickly, and whether the attendee ever finds out there was a rule at all.
Football spent thirty years discovering that you can optimise a matchday right up to the point where the people who made it worth attending stop turning up. Business events have the advantage of watching that happen from the stands. The flat-fee thinking behind our pricing comes from the same instinct: the fewer places your platform can surprise someone, the fewer awkward conversations you have at the door.
