I didn't miss your point, it just makes your comparison even worse. You're comparing secondary market ticket prices to tickets with artificially lowered prices sold through a lottery. Decent El Clasico tickets cost a lot more and the median income in Spain is about half the Canadian one.

The relative quality of the games also doesn't really matter, what matters is there are a lot more people in Toronto who want to see an MLS final than there are places to put their butts in. Maybe there should have been a lottery for them but that's also not up to Ticketmaster.

"but people will pay it" is not a proper response to the argument that people are being gouged. For one, scalpers drive up the price beyond what most would consider a fair market. Secondly, TicketMaster itself allows the resale of tickets on their site. This creates huge opportunities to buy up tickets and resell. But people pay. Yes they do but it the price is not being dictated by true market demand, rather they are being driven up by parasites. The scalpers are creating an unjustified sense of scarcity to feed their bottom line and ticketmaster goes along with it because it's all profit. The 2nd sale on their site is even more free money for TicketMaster.

"but people will pay it" is not a proper response to the argument that people are being gouged. Especially given the monopoly conditions often in place.

I don't know if 'but people will pay for it' is a 'proper' response but it's not one I made.

>> what matters is there are a lot more people in Toronto who want to see an MLS final than there are places to put their butts in.

The TFC demand in Toronto is a very recent thing though. They pretty much sucked for most of their existence, and there's a huge hunger in Toronto to win a title from a "big league" sport, even if it is "just" MLS.

You are missing the point. It IS upto Ticketmaster to try and avoid scalpers/bots buying all the tickets and then reselling. Bring credit card that you bought tickets with and show it at the door along with government ID. It is easily possible. MLS is to blame, but so is Ticketmaster.

You can't tell me your point is the price is unreasonable when comparing non-comprable prices inaccurately and then when I say that's not true, I'm missing the point because ticketmaster, who doesn't organize the event or the venue, didn't magically run some fairer ticket distribution system. I mean. You can, it just doesn't make any sense.

>It IS Ticketmaster's fault that fans don't even get a decent shot at buying the tickets. How do you justify site not loading at 1:00pm and tickets selling out at 1:01 pm. There was a per-sale that started at 12:00pm and by 12:10pm, pre-sale tickets were sold out.

That was my main point. Maybe you just don't understand what i said or maybe you don't want to.

"And rows appear on stubhub at 1:20pm for ~$500 a ticket. I can fucking watch Real Madrid vs Barcelona (arguably the biggest soccer game in the world after CL final) for a ticket price cheaper than that."

I suppose I don't.