28/08/2026

MUST statement: MANCHESTER UNITED’S MASS TICKETING SANCTIONS EXERCISE

MANCHESTER UNITED’S MASS
TICKETING SANCTIONS EXERCISE

MUST statement

Over the last month the Club has carried out a massive exercise seeking to cancel Season Tickets and Memberships for those it believes to be touts. The exercise has caused mass consternation in the fanbase, as it has clearly caught many ordinary fans as well those it sought to target.

Most fans support action against genuine ticket touts. But we do not accept that suspicious digital behaviour should be converted into a finding of touting without sufficient evidence of actual wrongdoing - or that supporters should lose long-held Season Tickets through a process they cannot properly understand or answer.

Over recent weeks hundreds of Manchester United supporters have been caught up in an unprecedented Club investigation into alleged ticket touting and misuse of ticketing accounts.

Some supporters have had restrictions removed. Some have received lesser sanctions or warnings. Others have ultimately lost their Season Tickets.

Throughout this period MUST has deliberately avoided providing a running public commentary while decisions remained live on so many individual cases.

That should not be mistaken for silence, agreement with the Club or inactivity. Our priority has been to work every single day to try to get the best outcomes for our supporters caught up in this process and making public comment may have risked jeopardising the outcomes of cases under review.

Since the scale of this exercise first became apparent, MUST representatives, working alongside other Fans’ Forum and Fan Advisory Board representatives, have devoted an extraordinary amount of time to challenging the process, proposing alternatives, assisting individual supporters, reviewing cases and repeatedly asking the Club to reconsider both its overall approach and individual decisions.

Our ISLO service has dealt with a huge volume of affected supporters. Representatives have spent hundreds of hours examining cases, speaking to fans, reviewing Club correspondence, helping supporters prepare responses and appeals, identifying common problems and raising cases directly for reconsideration.

We can point to many cases where the eventual outcome improved following further review and representations.

But too many others have still suffered the most serious consequences, including the loss of Season Tickets held in some cases for decades.

Now that much of the immediate casework has progressed, we believe supporters are entitled to a much fuller account of the position we took and the work undertaken on their behalf.

First, an important point about confidentiality

We intend to be as transparent as possible about what MUST and other supporter representatives said, proposed and did throughout this exercise.

However, clearly we will not publish confidential correspondence, disclose private information relating to individual supporters or reveal material shared with representatives under confidentiality obligations.

That inevitably means this account cannot reproduce every conversation or every argument.

But we can - and will - set out our own position, our own proposals and the actions we took.

That record is substantial.

This was Manchester United’s exercise, not a policy agreed with supporter representatives

The fundamental point is straightforward.

This mass investigation was initiated and designed by Manchester United. We did not devise it and supporter representatives were not consulted in advance about the approach subsequently applied at this scale, and we did not agree with significant aspects of it.

We know the vast majority of fans support action against professional ticket touting.

Supporters are amongst the biggest victims of organised resale, automated purchasing and people exploiting demand for Manchester United tickets for commercial profit.

Our disagreement has never been about whether Manchester United should tackle touting.

It has been about how the Club determines who is actually a tout and what evidence should be required before a supporter suffers a punishment as severe as losing their Season Ticket.

That distinction matters.

Our central disagreement: suspicion is not proof

The Club’s analysis appears capable of identifying unusual relationships between accounts, devices, login activity, ticket applications and other digital behaviour.

That can be useful intelligence.

But our position throughout has been:

The fact that somebody has accessed multiple accounts, allowed another supporter access to theirs, applied for tickets as part of a large group or engaged in some other unusual digital pattern may justify asking questions.

It does not necessarily establish what happened to a ticket.

In too many cases we have seen what appears to us to be a jump from “this behaviour looks suspicious” to “touting is the most likely explanation”, without direct evidence establishing an actual commercial resale.

That is the point we have repeatedly challenged.

A pattern of indicators can be evidence. It cannot itself be the offence.

After investigating those indicators, the Club should still be able to identify:

• what it concludes the supporter actually did;
• what evidence establishes that conduct;
• what rule or Ticketing Term was breached; and
• why that particular breach justifies the sanction imposed.

The greater the sanction, the greater the need for confidence in that conclusion.

Taking away a Season Ticket which may have been held for decades should not be treated in the same way as deciding whether an account merits further investigation.

We asked the Club to pause

When the scale of the exercise became clear in July, supporter representatives immediately asked Manchester United to pause further sanctions and hold off cancelling Season Tickets while the concerns could be properly examined.

The Fans’ Forum letter of 17 July specifically asked the Club to pause further suspensions and Season Ticket cancellations. MUST published that position to supporters on 18 July.

Along with The Red Army, The 1958 and MU Youth Supporters Club that request was backed publicly by more than 100 Manchester United supporter groups and organisations.

Once it became apparent that the exercise was capturing significant numbers of genuine, long-established supporters and that everyday supporter behaviour was more complicated than the original data suggested, we believed the prudent response should be to stop, examine what had been learned and refine the process before imposing irreversible sanctions. The club did not agree to that request to pause.

This was not simply a demand for leniency

It is important to understand the extent of the alternative approach we proposed.

We did not simply tell Manchester United to “stop banning fans”.

Across numerous meetings, emails, multiple written discussion papers and individual representations, MUST and fellow supporter representatives proposed a substantially different model for tackling touting.

Amongst the changes and safeguards we argued for were:

• Pause further severe sanctions while the emerging problems with the exercise were reviewed.
• Withdraw or defer cancellation decisions based principally on behavioural patterns while continuing to investigate cases where there was stronger evidence of commercial touting, fraud or comparable serious misconduct.
• Treat account/device analysis and behavioural patterns as intelligence directing further investigation rather than sufficient proof of wrongdoing in themselves.
• Require corroborating evidence of actual ticket activity before imposing the most serious sanctions.
• Separate clearly the investigative indicator from the eventual offence found.
• Require each serious case to identify the specific conduct alleged, principal evidence, Ticketing Term breached, sanctions category and reason that sanction followed.
• Make clear that the burden remains on the Club to establish the breach, rather than requiring supporters to prove innocence.
• Define clearly what the Club means by touting, distinguishing organised commercial ticket exploitation from ordinary fans behaviour that may technically breach other ticketing-rules.
• Define evidential thresholds for findings such as commercial activity, financial gain, systematic misuse and account control.
• Recognise that a severe and potentially permanent consequence requires a stronger evidential basis than the threshold merely required to open an investigation.
• Differentiate between “disposable” Member accounts used by touts and established Season Ticket Holders with long, verified attendance histories.
• Phase the investigation, concentrating first on the strongest and highest-risk cases rather than trying to process an enormous volume simultaneously.
• Reconsider the original account-number threshold after it became evident that legitimate account sharing and management was more widespread than initially understood.
• Model higher thresholds and apply any revised threshold retrospectively, unless other case-specific evidence justified continuing an investigation.
• Distinguish genuine supporter networks from professional touting networks by examining the actual relationships involved.
• Give proper weight where account holders know one another, travel or attend together, can explain why access was provided, can identify ticket recipients and where there is no evidence of financial benefit.
• Recognise the particular culture of the United away following, where networks of long-standing matchgoers have helped each other obtain and manage tickets for decades.
• Recognise that account/password sharing with trusted friends and family had become commonplace amongst genuine supporters.
• If Manchester United wanted to change its approach to that behaviour, consult first, explain the rules clearly and give supporters an opportunity to change their behaviour rather than retrospectively imposing severe sanctions.
• Use education and formal warnings as the normal starting point for non-commercial first offences.
• Reserve Season Ticket cancellation for exceptional cases involving demonstrated commercial touting, fraud, serious misconduct or repeated offending.
• Use proportionate intermediate sanctions where an actual breach was established but commercial touting was not.
• Give every affected supporter a proper statement of the case they were required to answer.
• Identify relevant accounts, dates, activity, transactions, applications or ticket movements sufficiently clearly for the supporter to explain them.
• Where information could not be disclosed because it would expose detection techniques, treat that material primarily as investigative intelligence rather than decisive evidence which the supporter could never answer.
• Ensure no supporter was judged prejudicially for failing to explain accounts, transactions or activity which had never been properly identified to them.
• Give supporters another opportunity to respond whenever materially fuller information emerged later in the process.
• Ensure a supporter could address the substantive evidence being used to determine their case.
• Ensure complete supporter submissions and supporting evidence were considered rather than merely abbreviated summaries.
• Where materially new adverse evidence or reasoning emerged, give the supporter the chance to respond before a final decision.
• Provide meaningful written reasons explaining the factual conclusion and why the sanction followed.
• Establish a common decision framework so hundreds of similar cases were assessed consistently.
• Test the process using anonymised examples covering obvious wrongdoing, obvious innocent cases, lesser breaches and genuinely borderline cases.
• Establish a light-touch independent assurance mechanism capable of reviewing a sample of cases and identifying systemic problems before they affected large numbers of supporters.
• Strengthen independence and separation between original decision-making and subsequent review.
• Recognise that serious procedural unfairness - including undisclosed evidence or an inadequately particularised allegation - should itself be capable of affecting the outcome.
• Introduce safeguards for elderly, vulnerable, disabled and digitally inexperienced supporters, so that a poor or incomplete written explanation was not treated as evidence of wrongdoing.
• Recognise the enormous anxiety and mental-health impact caused by threatening people with the loss of Season Tickets which may represent decades of family and social history.
• Ensure the timetable accommodates a fair process rather than reducing the requirements of fairness simply because an exceptionally large number of cases had been generated.
• Fix ticketing systems which create incentives for undesirable supporter behaviour rather than relying increasingly on enforcement.
• Explore better intelligence against actual commercial resale, including enhanced supporter reporting and evidence-gathering against people selling tickets illegally as an alternative approach.
• Provide reassurance that the exercise was not being used to reduce the Season Ticket population or convert Season Tickets into higher-yield “products”.
• Commit to proper supporter consultation before any comparable exercise is undertaken again.

These were not retrospective objections assembled after the decisions had been made. They were put forward while cases were live and while there was still an opportunity to change course.

Taken together, they amounted to an alternative anti-touting strategy: one which sought to make enforcement more accurate and effective while reducing the risk of serious collateral damage to genuine supporters.

We repeatedly escalated our concerns

This was not one letter followed by silence.

There were numerous meetings and exchanges with Manchester United throughout the process, several of them extremely robust and at times heated.

That includes the Fans’ Forum meeting at the end of July.

The eventual minutes will inevitably capture the formal substance of parts of that discussion. Minutes can never adequately convey the intensity of some of the exchanges, the level of frustration amongst supporter representatives or the strength with which the Club’s approach was challenged.

The same applies to many other meetings and conversations throughout this period.

Supporter representatives repeatedly pressed the point that the issue was not whether touting should be tackled, but whether the evidence being used was sufficiently reliable to distinguish actual touts from genuine supporters exhibiting behaviour the Club regarded as suspicious.

What we did – a timeline

The chronology below is not a complete record of our work. From the moment the scale of the exercise became clear, MUST representatives were working on it every single day, with constant back-and-forth on individual cases and on the overall process. These are selected snapshots of that activity, included to illustrate the sort of work taking place throughout the period and to demonstrate that our concerns were raised while the process was live, not reconstructed afterwards.

What did our intervention actually achieve?

We should also be candid about what we did not achieve.

We did not persuade Manchester United to pause and reset the entire exercise in the way we asked. We did not secure all of the evidential and procedural safeguards we proposed. Too many supporters have still lost their Season Tickets in circumstances where we do not believe the evidence justified that outcome.

It would be wrong to pretend otherwise.

But it would be equally wrong to conclude that engagement therefore achieved little or nothing.

There were two battles taking place at the same time: trying to change the overall process, and trying to protect individual supporters within that process. We did not secure the systemic changes to the extent we wanted. That did not make it sensible to abandon the individual cases that could still be changed.

Every supporter who contacted MUST about this exercise was treated as a case we should do our best to represent to the Club. We reviewed the information available, helped supporters understand and respond to the allegations, raised cases for reconsideration and challenged outcomes where we believed the evidence or sanction was wrong.

Our provisional internal tracking of the cases we are following - which is still being reconciled and is not yet ready to be relied upon as final data - currently suggests that only around one in five cases which have been through the appeal process have been upheld in full. In the large majority, the outcome has instead been an overturn, no sanction, a final warning or a materially lesser sanction.

For now, the broad picture is already important: case-by-case reconsideration and supporter representation have mattered.

We do not seek to claim sole credit for every changed outcome. Decisions are the Club's to make, and cases can change for a number of reasons. What we can say is that many supporters whose cases were brought to us and raised for further consideration ultimately received materially better outcomes.

Successful supporter representation is often invisible. A supporter knows immediately if they lose a Season Ticket. They may never know that an earlier proposed outcome was changed, that their case was reconsidered after wider representations, or that arguments made across a group of cases contributed to a different approach in their own case.

That is why the fact that we did not win every argument about the overall system cannot sensibly be used as an argument that we should have stopped fighting the individual cases. Had we walked away, the Club's process would still have continued - but affected supporters would have had less help, less scrutiny and less organised supporter challenge.

We have also received a firm commitment that this exercise will not reduce the number of season tickets. The club have confirmed to us that every season ticket they do cancel will be reallocated as a season ticket to those on the waiting list. Furthermore for any matches where tickets are suspended to the holder they will only be resold at the season ticket price, not at the higher member price. Any season ticket which is cancelled will be refunded in full.

Why didn’t MUST simply walk away?

This is a question we asked ourselves repeatedly.

Continuing to engage has carried an enormous cost.

A relatively small number of supporter representatives have devoted hundreds of hours to this issue, often on top of jobs, families and other responsibilities.

Sadly, they have also been subjected to personal abuse, accusations and misrepresentation from frustrated supporters who may be unaware of the action we have been taking.

Walking away would undoubtedly have been easier.

But it would not have stopped Manchester United’s process.

It would have meant hundreds of affected supporters facing that process with even less supporter representation, scrutiny or assistance and the club having no pressure to change approach.

We believed that would have produced worse outcomes.

So we stayed involved.

That should not be confused with endorsing the process.

There is a fundamental difference between participating in an attempt to mitigate the consequences of something you oppose and agreeing with the thing itself.

Supporter representation is influence, not control. We can argue, challenge, expose weaknesses and persuade, but Manchester United makes the decisions.

Our failure to persuade the Club to change the overall process as far as we wanted did not make it sensible to stop trying to protect individual supporters from the consequences of that process.

Should MUST fund litigation?

A number of supporters have suggested that MUST should simply use members’ Withdrawable Share Capital (WSC) to fund a legal challenge against Manchester United.

We understand the sentiment.

But this misunderstands what Withdrawable Share Capital is.

WSC is members’ share capital, not a discretionary campaigning or litigation fund available to MUST. We cannot spend those funds - it would be unlawful.

Much of it originated from the proceeds of Manchester United shares formerly owned by individual supporters. It remains withdrawable by those members and is ring-fenced separately from the funds MUST uses for its normal operations and campaigning.

It therefore cannot simply be regarded as money which MUST can decide to spend on litigation.

That does not mean legal action is ruled out.

We are taking advice.

If professional advice establishes that there is a viable legal challenge capable of assisting affected supporters, we can then consider how such an action should properly be funded.

That could include creating a dedicated legal fighting fund.

Legal action therefore remains a live option.

But the correct order is: establish that there is a viable legal case first, then establish the appropriate and transparent means of funding it. And quite rightly our first priority was to assist as many supporters as possible while there remained the opportunity to get a better outcome.

What happens to supporters whose appeals have failed?

A supporter who has exhausted Manchester United’s internal process can take their complaint to the Independent Football Ombudsman.

MUST will continue trying to assist affected supporters who want advice on presenting their case.

We are also considering the wider avenues available, including:

• the Independent Football Ombudsman;
• potential legal challenges where appropriate;
• the Football Supporters’ Association; and
• whether aspects of this episode should be raised with the new Independent Football Regulator.

Our work is therefore not finished simply because Manchester United’s internal process has reached a decision.

The damage to fan engagement is immense

There is a wider consequence which Manchester United now needs to confront.

This exercise has done immense damage to confidence in the Club’s supporter-engagement structures. We made this point repeatedly during our discussions and it remains a source of major concern that the club prioritised this exercise over the damage that was being done in the process.

For years, supporter representatives have argued that dialogue is valuable because difficult issues can be addressed before they develop into major conflicts.

That requires consultation to happen before significant policies affecting large numbers of supporters are implemented.

It also requires the Club to be capable of responding quickly when its recognised supporter bodies collectively identify a serious problem and ask it to reconsider.

Launching an exercise of this scale without advance consultation, and then continuing while supporter representatives were asking for a pause and fundamental review, has badly damaged confidence in that proposition.

That damage extends beyond the individuals directly sanctioned.

Many ordinary matchgoing supporters are now asking whether the Club understands their culture, whether established supporter behaviour is being interpreted fairly and whether the engagement structures Manchester United itself has helped create genuinely influence major supporter-facing decisions.

Those are serious questions.

But the answer is not to destroy fan engagement

Some critics will inevitably argue that this proves supporter representatives should simply walk away from dialogue with Manchester United.

That would not make supporter influence stronger.

It would leave the Club freer to make decisions without organised supporter challenge and would remove precisely the channels through which supporters have secured significant improvements over many years. Many of those “wins” are never seen by fans because they are stopping damaging new proposals before they become club policy.

The lesson from this episode is not that engagement has no value.

It is that Manchester United now needs to demonstrate that it values engagement enough to use it properly.

Supporter engagement cannot mean informing representatives after major decisions have effectively been taken and then expecting them to manage the reaction.

It must mean bringing supporter knowledge and experience into the process before decisions are made, particularly where those decisions affect thousands of loyal matchgoers.

This investigation itself demonstrates why.

Had the culture of supporter account sharing, away-ticket networks and matchgoing groups been properly understood and discussed beforehand, many of the problems subsequently encountered could potentially have been anticipated.

That is precisely what meaningful supporter engagement is supposed to achieve.

A challenge to Manchester United

The immediate casework will eventually finish.

The damage caused by this episode will not.

Manchester United now has a substantial task ahead if it wants to rebuild confidence amongst its matchgoing support and restore credibility to its fan-engagement structures.

We therefore want the Club to set out clearly what it has learned from this exercise and what it will now do differently.

The question is not whether fan engagement continues to exist on paper. It is whether supporters can have confidence that it will influence major decisions in practice.

Repairing that damage will require more than another meeting or a general assurance that lessons have been learned. It requires identifiable changes.

In particular, we want to know:

• how supporter representatives will be consulted before future major ticketing enforcement policies are introduced;
• how the Club intends to rebuild trust with the supporters affected by this investigation;
• what review will take place of the evidence thresholds and safeguards used;
• how future anti-touting investigations will distinguish intelligence from proof;
• what changes will be made to ticketing systems and rules which contribute to undesirable behaviour;
• how genuine supporter networks will be distinguished from commercial touting operations;
• what improvements will be made to disclosure, proportionality and appeal rights and the appeals process;
• what safeguards will prevent another very large caseload overwhelming the ability to give every supporter genuinely individual consideration; and
• what concrete steps the Club will take to demonstrate to the wider fanbase that formal supporter engagement has meaningful influence on decisions.

MUST believes strongly in independent, robust supporter representation.

Sometimes that means working constructively with the Club.

Sometimes it means agreeing with the Club.

And sometimes - as throughout much of this episode - it means arguing vigorously against what the Club is doing while continuing to engage because walking away would leave supporters with even less influence.

The effectiveness of engagement should not be judged by whether supporter representatives always get everything they demand. But we should expect that consultation to happen in accordance with the Gunning Principles and as outlined in the club’s own annual FAB Assessment.

But nor can it survive if major decisions affecting thousands of supporters are taken first and communicated as a fait accompli.

Manchester United has spent years developing the Fans’ Forum, Fan Advisory Board and relationships with independent supporter organisations.

The Club now has to demonstrate that those structures matter when the issues are difficult, not just when agreement is easy.

Where MUST stands

Our position remains straightforward.

Fans support action against genuine ticket touts.

Sophisticated technology and intelligence can help identify cases for further investigation.

But we do not accept that suspicious digital behaviour alone should be transformed into a finding of touting without sufficient evidence of actual wrongdoing.

We do not accept that supporters should lose Season Tickets through a process where they cannot properly understand or answer the case against them.

And we do not accept that an exercise capable of inflicting such serious consequences on hundreds of supporters should ever again be undertaken on this scale without proper advance consultation and adequate safeguards.

We tried throughout this process to persuade Manchester United to adopt a different approach.

We tried to get cases reconsidered.

We helped supporters respond.

We proposed alternatives.

We argued for a pause.

We challenged the evidential threshold.

We challenged the fairness of the process.

We proposed better ways of identifying genuine touting.

And when walking away would have been easier for us personally, we stayed because walking away would have left affected supporters with less help and less representation, not more.

Many supporters have retained their Season Tickets following reconsideration of their cases.

For those supporters, that work mattered.

For those who have ultimately lost theirs, we know that is little consolation.

We will continue doing everything reasonably available to assist them.

And we will continue pressing Manchester United not simply to finish this exercise, but to learn from it, repair the damage it has caused and rebuild the confidence of the supporters whose loyalty the Club depends upon.