TheTicketingBusiness Forum 2026 opened in Manchester on April 27 during what may have been the most consequential month for the ticketing industry in years. Price cap legislation advancing in the UK and California. The first major enforcement actions under all-in pricing rules. New regulatory frameworks taking shape across Europe. And a growing number of primary platforms making structural commitments to official, controlled resale.
All of this converged in the same four-week window. And when more than 500 executives from ticketing platforms, rights holders, venues, and technology companies gathered at Emirates Old Trafford, the conversation had already shifted. The question was no longer whether the industry needed to change. It was how fast, and who would be ready.
This is what we heard.
The data layer is now a strategic asset, not a reporting tool
The most revealing sessions at TBF26 were not about technology. They were about who controls the information that technology generates.
Aaron Lampkin, VP of Ticketing at LA28, opened day two with a presentation that framed the Olympic ticketing strategy entirely around data-driven intelligence. LA28 started its ticketing planning early, deliberately, to leave room to learn, adapt, and repivot based on what the data revealed. They conducted deep market studies across international competitions and major US leagues. They concluded they could sell out the Games in California alone. The first sales phase closed with 4.4 million tickets sold across 85 countries, setting a Games record. And they announced something no previous Olympic organiser has offered: an official resale platform with rotating barcodes, launching in 2027.
This is not a ticketing company experimenting with resale. This is the largest global sporting event designing resale into its infrastructure from day one, because the data told them it was the best way to avoid empty venues.
SailGP told a different version of the same story. Before partnering with Fever for a global ticketing agreement, SailGP was working with seven ticketing platforms across its international events. The consolidation was not about cost or convenience. Marek Borowik, Director of Fan Engagement and Event Experience, was direct: fan data is equally important to SailGP as race performance data. They moved to a single partner to capture the data layer, not to simplify the vendor list.
Simon Weber, co-founder of vivenu, framed the shift in terms that would have sounded premature two years ago: ticketing strategy has moved from a box-office decision to a boardroom decision. When data ownership becomes a competitive differentiator at the level of sports property valuation and Olympic planning, the platforms that treat data as a byproduct of sales, rather than as the product itself, fall behind structurally.
For resale, this has a specific and practical implication. Every ticket that is resold on an external platform generates data, pricing behavior, timing patterns, demand signals, fan identity, .that the original platform never sees. That data leaks alongside the transaction. And as the industry moves toward lifecycle-based strategies, that blind spot grows from an inconvenience into a strategic vulnerability.
The silo problem is not technical, it is architectural
One of the most candid moments at the forum came from someone who arrived in ticketing from outside the industry.
Sana Ali Aamir, Regional GM for Northern Europe at Fever, the company crowned Ticketing Business of the Year at TBA26, described what she noticed when she moved from finance into ticketing operations: different parts of the fan journey still operate in separate silos. Discovery, purchase, entry, in-venue, post-event, each managed by different systems, different teams, different data sets. Nobody is connecting the dots. And the value locked inside those disconnections is substantial.
Clare Kenny, CMO at TicketCo, reinforced the point with a harder edge: the average sports club is 15 years behind a standard consumer business when it comes to integration. Not 15 months. Fifteen years.
The "Ticket to Turnstile to Till" panel explored what a connected customer journey looks like in practice, how linking purchase data with entry data with at-venue spending creates a single customer view that can inform operations in real time. Stuart Whittick from Twickenham and Grant Wyatt from FEP Pay shared examples of connecting venue payment systems back to ticketing data. The conclusion: the value is there. The infrastructure to capture it is not.
This matters for resale infrastructure because resale sits at a critical junction in the ticket lifecycle. A resale transaction is not just a financial event, it is a data event. It reveals when demand spikes, how pricing behaves relative to the event date, what percentage of fans price at, above, or below face value, and where inventory concentration builds. When resale happens inside the platform, that data feeds back into the primary system. When it happens externally, it becomes invisible.
The silo problem is not about technology vendors failing to integrate. It is about an industry that historically ended its relationship with the ticket at the point of sale. The platforms that extend that relationship, through resale, transfers, upgrades, waitlists, and post-purchase services, are the ones closing the data loop.
Regulation has crossed from legislation into operations
At previous industry events, regulation was a panel topic. At TBF26, it was embedded in every conversation, pricing, identity, fan protection, compliance, international expansion.
The True Identity and Fair Play panel brought together voices from across the ecosystem. Mikael Ungerholm, founder of ZipperTic, named the upstream problem directly: bots are the frontline issue. The problem starts with the primary sale. Take away the bots and what remains is ethical resale. The responsibility falls on primary sale stakeholders.
Juan Pablo Santa Maria, CRO at menta tech, addressed what comes after the bots: the question is where to deploy technology so that fans can resell tickets legitimately, inside the primary ecosystem, not pushed into external channels. The problem is not the concept of resale. It is the absence of proper infrastructure in primary.
Sam Shemtob, Director of FEAT (the Fully-authorised European Alliance for Ticketing), raised a dimension that most industry discussions still underestimate: the role of search engines in surfacing and promoting unauthorised resale listings, giving them visibility that competes with, and often outranks, official channels.
And Lou Champion, Director of Ticketing at The O2, brought the conversation back to the human level: the real cost of unauthorised resale is fans denied entry at the door, holding tickets they believed were genuine.
Meanwhile, Paul Bohunsky from CTS Eventim provided a ground-level view of what regulatory compliance actually looks like in practice. Localising a ticketing platform across European markets is not a one-time project. Every country has specific regulations, and those regulations change. The adaptation is continuous.
The convergence of all of these perspectives, bots, search engines, fake tickets, multi-jurisdiction compliance, fan protection,. points to a single operational reality: regulation is no longer something that can be managed through terms and conditions. It needs to be embedded in infrastructure. Rules that enforce themselves. Compliance that adapts automatically. Pricing logic that respects caps, floors, and jurisdiction-specific requirements without manual intervention.
Platforms that do not have this infrastructure face increasing regulatory exposure. Platforms that do have it gain a structural advantage, not just in compliance, but in trust.
The competitive landscape is reordering around resale
Several signals converged during and around TBF26 that, taken together, represent a meaningful shift in how the industry is approaching resale.
Across the industry, primary platforms are making structural commitments to official resale, not as pilot programs, but as core capabilities. Face-value resale models are expanding. Platforms are publishing dedicated resale marketing pages and positioning secondary market operations as native, brand-integrated features.
Line-Up launched Reach at TBF26, a product that enables venues, producers, and agents to sell inventory from multiple ticketing systems through a single platform. The industry's infrastructure layer is becoming more modular, more composable, and more oriented toward controlling the full lifecycle.
And at TBF26 itself, the geographic breadth of interest in resale infrastructure was striking. PASSO presented its evolution from Turkey's dominant ticketing platform to a multi-vertical SuperApp with 12 million users, integrating ticketing with fintech and e-commerce into a 365-day fan relationship. Eleonora Mihova, CEO of Ticket Station Bulgaria, discussed the operational realities of running large-scale ticketing in smaller European markets. Nuweb Group, which had recently launched native resale with UberTickets in Southeast Asia, was on the panel.
In the corridors, conversations with ticketing companies from Croatia, Bulgaria, Latvia, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and Norway all circled the same question. Not whether to offer resale. How to bring it inside their own ecosystem, under their own brand, their own rules, their own data.
When companies across multiple continents, at very different stages of market development, independently reach the same conclusion, resale needs to happen inside the primary platform, that is not a trend. That is a structural transition.
What the next five years look like
TBF26 did not predict the future but it surfaced the forces that will shape it.
The competitive landscape is opening up. Independent platforms that have historically operated with limited room to differentiate now face a broader competitive surface, and need infrastructure that lets them compete on capability, not just availability.
Regulation will continue to tighten and localise. Price caps, identity requirements, all-in pricing mandates, and speculative listing bans will expand across jurisdictions. The platforms that embed compliance into their infrastructure will operate with confidence. The ones that bolt it on will operate with risk.
Data ownership will increasingly determine strategic positioning. The platforms that control the full lifecycle of the ticket, primary sale through resale, transfer, entry, and in-venue, will build the richest understanding of fan behavior and event economics. The ones that let secondary transactions happen externally will lose that visibility permanently.
AI will reshape how fans discover, purchase, and resell tickets, and will favor platforms whose data is structured, transparent, and accessible to AI interfaces.
And resale,which for years was treated as a problem to be managed or a feature to be added, will become recognised as what it structurally is: core infrastructure for the ticket lifecycle. Not optional. Not secondary. A fundamental part of how modern ticketing operates.
The platforms that build for this reality now will define how the industry works for the next decade.
The ones that wait will spend that decade catching up.
menta provides enterprise-grade, white-label, platform-native resale infrastructure for primary ticketing platforms. We presented at TBF26 on how to build scalable, compliant resale that works for fans, rightsholders, and platforms. To learn more, visit mentatech.io.
Sources and references
- TBF26 recap: data, AI and fragmentation
- TBF26: menta tech session preview
- TBA26 Awards winners
- Beyond the sold-out headline: what resale data really shows
- Five infrastructure decisions that will define the next decade of ticketing
- Five regulatory shifts reshaping ticket resale
