Arsenal cancelled more than 19,000 ticketing accounts and removed over 45,000 suspicious ballot entries during the 2025-26 season, and it is now attaching identity requirements to ballots, resale and away tickets. If your event runs any kind of lottery, a members-only price or a transfer policy, that last detail is the one worth reading twice.
Every seat here has an account behind it, and some of those accounts are lying · credit: Mitch Rosen / Unsplash
What Arsenal cancelled, and how much of it there was
The bans were not a cull of one cheap tier. According to the club's annual men's ticketing update, reported by TheTicketingBusiness on 20 August, the 19,000 cancelled accounts spanned red, silver, gold and platinum memberships as well as free online accounts. Since the 2022-23 season, Arsenal has now closed close to 74,000 accounts belonging to people trying to obtain tickets through unauthorised routes.
The scale of the legitimate operation underneath is worth stating too, because it is the denominator everything else sits over.
| Metric, 2025-26 men's competitive fixtures | Figure |
|---|---|
| Tickets purchased at Emirates Stadium | 1.8 million |
| Individual supporters admitted | 260,415 |
| Tickets allocated through member ballots | 273,000 (over 9,100 per match) |
| Ticket Exchange resale purchases | 156,000 (about 5,200 per game) |
| Average tickets transferred between supporters per fixture | 10,300 |
| Accounts banned this season | 19,000 |
| Suspicious ballot entries removed | 45,000 |
Why 45,000 deleted ballot entries is the scarier number
Bans look backwards. By the time you cancel an account, that account has usually already had tickets, gone to matches and probably sold a few on. Removing ballot entries looks forwards: those were caught before anything was allocated.
The two figures are different units, entries against tickets, so resist the temptation to divide one by the other. But set 45,000 removed entries next to 273,000 tickets distributed by ballot and the picture is clear enough. The ballot was under sustained, industrial attack, not occasional nibbling by a handful of chancers with three email addresses.
Arsenal's response is the interesting bit for everyone else. Alongside the bans, red and silver members now face new identity requirements when entering ballots, buying via Ticket Exchange and buying away tickets. The club has stopped treating an account as a person and started asking the account to prove it.
What this means for event organisers: conditional logic and attendee routing that actually holds
Most registration platforms are very good at conditional logic and attendee routing. Show this session to that badge type. Offer the member rate to anyone who ticks the member box. Route exhibitors down one path and delegates down another. All of it works beautifully, right up until the moment someone lies on the form.
Every routing rule you build sits on top of an assumption about identity, and if that assumption is a self-declared checkbox then the rule is decorative. The practical fixes are unglamorous:
Deduplicate on more than email address. Phone numbers, payment fingerprints and company domains all catch people who own eleven Gmail accounts.
Cap allocations per account and per household or company, not just per transaction.
Verify membership against your association or CRM record at the point of ballot entry, not at the point of complaint.
Make transfers named. An anonymous transfer is a resale with better manners.
Decide what happens to a cancelled registration before you cancel any, because the refund policy question will arrive within four minutes.
None of that requires a stadium. It requires a registration platform that lets you attach rules to a verified identity rather than to a form field.
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A registration rule you cannot enforce is not a rule. It is a polite request with a dropdown menu attached.
The part the press release skips: enforcement has a headcount
Arsenal's published anti-touting work, set out separately on the club's own site, is a useful antidote to anyone imagining this is a software problem with a software solution. The club has blocked up to 500,000 IP addresses during a single onsale window. It holds between 100 and 200 tickets per home game for collection so it can run ID checks in person. It runs in-person checks in the Family Enclosure, has engaged a dedicated anti-touting task force, works with police around the stadium and carries out mystery shopping on resale sites.
That is not a feature list. That is a rota. Somebody is standing at a collection window on a Tuesday night explaining to a genuine supporter why their ticket is being held, and somebody else is answering the complaint the following morning.
The conference equivalent is your operations team fielding "why has my registration been cancelled" emails at 7am on day one, in a venue foyer, with a queue forming. The lesson is not that enforcement is too expensive to bother with. It is that enforcement should happen as early in the funnel as possible, ideally weeks before anybody books a flight, because the cost of catching a bad registration rises steeply the closer it gets to the door.
Does any of this apply if you are not selling out a 60,000 seat stadium?
Scarcity is relative, and it does not need a resale market to be worth gaming. Capped roundtables, invite-only dinners, factory tours, hands-on labs and the good workshop that always fills in ninety seconds are all rationed goods, even when they are free. The currency is access and status rather than cash, and people will absolutely register three colleagues who have no intention of attending in order to hold seats.
For B2B events there is a second problem the football version does not have. Fake and duplicate registrations pollute your attendee data, which is the thing you hand to sponsors and exhibitors as evidence of value. A no-show rate inflated by accounts that were never real people is not just an operational annoyance. It is a renewal conversation you will lose next year.
Where this leaves your registration stack
Arsenal's numbers are a reminder that ticketing integrity is a running cost, not a one-off project, and that the platform underneath either helps or quietly bills you for the privilege of trying. It is worth checking what happens to your own economics when you cancel a few hundred fraudulent registrations. At eventcloud we charge a flat fee rather than a percentage of every ticket, which at least means cleaning up your attendee list does not also carve a hole in what you have already paid your platform.
Nineteen thousand cancelled accounts sounds like a failure. It is closer to the opposite: a club that finally has enough visibility to know who is in the building.
