Redskins’ Broker Deals

An internal team audit this spring discovered thousands of GA tickets were sold directly by employees of the Washington Redskins to about 15 ticket brokering companies.

The crux, according to the Washington Post, is that the team has boasted it has sold out every game for more than 70 years while more than 160,000 fans are on a waiting list. Excluding tickets, in this case, appears to be akin to a capital crime in some fans’ eyes.

“Somebody in the ticket office was doing something they shouldn’t have been doing, and when it was discovered, it was all dealt with,” Redskins Senior VP Karl Swanson told the paper. “If the story is, this is a scandal, uncovered by Redskins, verified by the Post, or whatever, yeah, we’re telling you: People got tickets who shouldn’t have gotten tickets, and they were dealt with.”

Redskins General Counsel David Donovan added that team owner Daniel Snyder was unaware of the sales to brokers and, upon hearing of the deals, moved to have the broker accounts canceled.

“When Mr. Snyder found out about it,” Donovan said, “he made it clear to me that that was priority number one.”
However, there is another side to the Post report. The team is aligned with StubHub, which serves as the “preferred marketplace” for Redskins fans to sell tickets to other fans.

The deal also apparently allowed the team’s employees to sell tickets through the site under the team’s account. According to documents obtained by the Post, more than 50 tickets and parking passes worth more than $20,000 were sold under the pseudonym “Joe Redskin.”

Officials told the paper that the employee sales on StubHub were discovered at about the same time as the broker accounts.

“We conducted an investigation, we took some actions against some employees, and that’s really all I can say,” Donovan said. “I’m not saying we took action against any employee regarding the Joe Redskin account, per se. There were issues in the ticket office with regard to broker transactions. There were issues in the ticket office with respect to sales of tickets by individuals on the club’s account.”

But there is another wrinkle. The Post followed up the Sept. 2 story the next day, this one involving accusations of “double-dipping.” According to lawsuits reviewed by the Post, the Snyder-controlled company WFI Stadium sued Redskin ticketholders who had defaulted on their season tickets, got judgments in some cases, and sold those tickets to online broker ASC Ticket Co.

Donovan rejected the notion that the Redskins were getting money from defaulting ticketholders plus money from the obtained tickets.

“Getting a judgment is not getting paid,” he told the Post.