New report: ticket fees + reseller markups cost fans $11B/year. The policy response gaining traction: cap platform fees at 10% and ban above-face resale. That’s a symptom fix. The real disease is that teams don’t own their ticketing infrastructure. They rent the fan relationship from ticketing marketplaces whose economics run on fees. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a ticket getting more expensive when demand exceeds supply. The team created the product, owns the inventory and should be able to price it accordingly. They need to balancing revenue against the long-term relationship with fans. The problem is when brokers and marketplaces sit between the team and fan, capture the upside from that demand, and have incentives that aren’t fully aligned with either side. And fee caps can actually make that worse for teams: they lose economics without gaining any more control. Teams need to go direct. When they do, they own the marketplace, the data and the economics. Its incentive is to maximize the lifetime value of the fan, not the fees on a transaction. Fix who owns the relationship, and you fix the incentives at the root of the problem.