The Higher Regional Court of Munich has found several of Viagogo's commercial practices misleading and in breach of German competition law, handing the Bundesliga a complete win in a fight that began in 2019. The useful part for organisers is not the verdict. It is the three-part test the judges set out, and it applies to your checkout as much as anyone's.
Seven years, one Supercup and a very patient legal department
The dispute started before the 2019 Supercup, when the league (then trading as the DFL) spotted tickets for the match already listed on Viagogo. Official sales had not opened. Nobody had a ticket to sell yet, which is a slightly awkward position from which to sell one.
The league warned supporters that these speculative listings meant real risk: pay now, and you might receive nothing, or receive something that gets you turned away at the turnstile, notwithstanding the word "guaranteed" hovering nearby. A cease-and-desist letter followed, then litigation, then more litigation. The matter climbed as far as the Federal Court of Justice before returning to Munich, where the Bundesliga's claim was upheld in full. Second division sides Karlsruher SC and FC St. Pauli, along with 1. Union Berlin, have won comparable cases, and Bayern Munich secured a favourable ruling of its own in recent years. This was less a bolt from the blue than the last domino.
Viagogo's position, given to TheTicketingBusiness by international business development spokesperson Julian Dwenger, is that the practices at issue are historic, long since fixed, and that the company welcomes the legal clarity. The judgment itself is not conditional on anyone agreeing with that.
What the court actually asked for
Strip out the German procedural detail and the ruling reduces to three questions a buyer must be able to answer before parting with money. The court also said platforms must not manufacture scarcity to hurry people into deciding, which is the polite judicial phrasing of "stop putting fake countdown timers on things".
| The test | What it means at checkout |
|---|---|
| Does the ticket exist | The buyer can tell whether inventory is real and allocated, not merely hoped for |
| What does the guarantee cover | The scope of any promise is stated in plain language, not buried in a footnote |
| Who is selling it | The identity of the actual seller is unambiguous on the page taking the payment |
White-label branding and the awkward question of who is selling your tickets
That third test is the one worth reading twice, because it is a branding question dressed as a legal one. A German court has now said, in effect, that seller identity is not a nice-to-have design flourish. It is a consumer protection requirement, and a platform that blurs it is doing something legally interesting rather than merely tacky.
Most B2B organisers never expect to be on the wrong side of this. Then they run a conference through a platform whose branding depth stops at a logo upload, the checkout drops the attendee onto a domain nobody recognises, the confirmation email arrives from a sender address belonging to a company the delegate has never heard of, and the finance team receives three emails asking whether the whole thing was a phishing attempt. Nobody misled anyone. The experience simply failed the who-is-selling-it test, and the reputational cost lands on the organiser, not the vendor.
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The design customisation conversation is usually filed under vanity. A Munich courtroom has just quietly reclassified it as risk management.
The practical version: check whether your registration flow keeps your domain, your sender identity and your visual language from first click to receipt, and whether the attendee could name the organiser at every step. If the honest answer is no, that is a platform capability gap, not a copywriting problem.
Germany is not finished with this
The Bundesliga is not treating the judgment as a full stop. Alongside the German Football Association, the German Olympic Sports Confederation, the concert and event industry body BDKV, the federation of German consumer organisations and the Bavarian consumer advice centre, it is pushing for statutory rules covering the secondary market. The wish list is specific: marketplaces would have to disclose the original face value, identify every seller clearly, and operate real safeguards against exploitative markups.
Anyone who followed Ontario's attempt to cap resale at face value will recognise the second and third items as the hard ones. Face value turns out to be a slippery concept once fees, dynamic pricing and bundled hospitality enter the picture, and "who is the seller" is deliberately fuzzy on marketplaces built around anonymous listings. Germany is proposing to legislate precisely the two things that have tripped up other jurisdictions this year, which suggests either unusual confidence or unusually good lawyers.
The wrinkle nobody has priced in: the buyer might be a robot
Here is the part the coverage has skipped. The court's requirements assume a human being reading a page and forming an impression. That assumption is aging fast. Ticketing platforms are now piping inventory into AI assistants, and a growing share of discovery happens in a chat window where the buyer never sees your checkout design at all.
An AI assistant summarising three purchase options does not perceive branding. It perceives structured data. If your event's seller identity, availability status and guarantee terms are not machine-readable, an assistant will paraphrase, and paraphrase is exactly where "clearly and unambiguously" goes to die. The organisers who come out of the next two years well will be the ones whose event data says who is selling, at what price, with what guarantee, in a format a model can quote without inventing anything. Transparency is becoming a data-structure problem, and most event tech stacks were not built with that in mind.
What to do about it before Monday
Run the court's three questions against your own registration flow as if you were a sceptical delegate with a corporate card. Can they tell the ticket is real? Can they tell what the refund or transfer promise actually covers? Can they name who is taking their money? Then check what your platform charges to fix whatever fails, because "available on the enterprise tier" is a common answer and a poor one. At eventcloud we take the boring view that transparent fees and unambiguous branding should be the default rather than an upgrade path. A Munich courtroom appears to agree, which is not a sentence we expected to write this week.
