In court documents, Moghal stated that she paid about $1,905 for three tickets to the June 18 Switzerland-Bosnia & Herzegovina match at SoFi Stadium in California. However, Moghal said that she never received the tickets or a requested refund. Renteria, meanwhile, paid $2,294 for two tickets to a Mexico-South Korea match in Guadalajara, Mexico, also held on June 18. He claims that he never received his tickets, either.
A group of soccer fans is suing StubHub over claims that the company continued to accept World Cup bookings even after it ran out of tickets.
According to The Associated Press, the lawsuit was filed earlier this week on behalf of California residents Julia Reeker Moghal and Reuben Renteria. Both plaintiffs say that StubHub’s “false and misleading” practices left them without tickets they’d purchased for group-stage matches that took place in June.
Attorneys for the two say that Moghal and Renteria are among hundreds—potentially even thousands—of World Cup fans who purchased tickets they later found out “did not exist, were revoked without any forewarning, or had been erased.” The lawsuit attributes these alterations to what FIFA has since described as a “poor digital infrastructure.”
In court documents, Moghal stated that she paid about $1,905 for three tickets to the June 18 Switzerland-Bosnia & Herzegovina match at SoFi Stadium in California. However, Moghal said that she never received the tickets or a requested refund. Renteria, meanwhile, paid $2,294 for two tickets to a Mexico-South Korea match in Guadalajara, Mexico, also held on June 18. He claims that he never received his tickets, either.
Both Moghal and Renteria said they received notifications indicating that their tickets were “ready,” only to find that StubHub cancelled their orders at the last minute. Renteria emphasized that, while he was eventually offered a full refund after filing “significant complaints,” he still had to bear the cost of travel to and from Mexico.
Moghal and Renteria are seeking monetary damages as well as a court order prohibiting StubHub from continuing to sell any additional World Cup tickets.
The potential class-action lawsuit also asks that any profits from previous match sales be provided to Moghal, Renteria, and other affected customers as compensation.
StubHub declined to comment on the lawsuit, but told The Associated Press that the company’s “singular goal is to get fans into events.” If anything goes wrong with a purchase or sale, StubHub said, “our FanProtect Guarantee provides replacement tickets or a full refund.”
“The World Cup is no different, and the issues fans have experienced are largely driven by problems with the event organizer’s own ticketing infrastructure,” StubHub said.
The Associated Press notes that FIFA encourages fans to buy tickets through its own online marketplace, where it adds a 30% surcharge to every resold ticket. FIFA, for its part, said that it “has no visibility over, or control of, secondary market ticket transactions carried out on third-party platforms” like StubHub and “rejects any suggestion that the functional issues being experienced by users of third-party platforms” can or should be traced back to FIFA’s own ticketing system.
Sources
StubHub accused of failing to deliver pricey World Cup tickets
StubHub sued by fans who say ticket cancellations crushed dreams of going to World Cup
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