Ticketmaster and NHL Stick a New Deal

By Alfred Branch, Jr.

A day after announcing its secondary ticketing deal with the National Football League, Ticketmaster signed a similar agreement with the National Hockey League. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Ticketmaster will be the official secondary ticket reseller for the league, which just three years ago was shut down due to owners locking out players in a contract dispute. The league has struggled to generate respectable television ratings, but attendance at games has steadily climbed since the lockout and has virtually matched its pre-lockout numbers.

By landing the NHL, Ticketmaster is now the official secondary ticketer for three of the four major North American sports leagues, with the NFL and the National Basketball Association. The fourth league, Major League Baseball, signed an exclusive deal with StubHub! over the summer.

But, even with the three leagues, Ticketmaster has struggled to gain traction among fans as a source for ticket deals at the secondary level. Overall, the company was late ramping up in the secondary market, and even though it has aggressively moved into the space in the past year or so, it still lags far behind StubHub!, TicketsNow, RazorGator and TicketLiquidator.com, and fans still buy and resell tickets to those sports through websites all over the internet.

Ticketmaster was already the authorized ticket reseller for 14 NHL teams, but the league hopes that Ticketmaster’s size, security and marketing prowess will help drive fans to the new venture.

“Over 22 million people attend NHL games each season,” John Collins, NHL Senior Executive Vice President Business & Media, said in a statement. “Aligning the NHL brand with the global leader in ticket solutions to develop an NHL marketplace offers our fans a secure and reliable way to buy and resell NHL tickets.”