A ticket reseller has listed more than 2,000 tickets for U2's four concerts at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in June 2027, with some seats offered at over four times their face value. If every listed ticket sold at the asking prices, the total would exceed £1 million, according to an investigation by The Guardian.
The seller, named as Vladyslav Skrypka, is listed on StubHub and says he is based in Harlow, Essex. The investigation found more than 1,800 tickets advertised for a single night. Automated bots that bypass purchase limits have been outlawed in the UK since 2018, and the scale of the listings has led to suspicions of bot use or speculative selling. Those suspicions have not been confirmed, and the seller has not been shown to have broken any rule.
StubHub says it bans speculative selling and requires sellers to confirm they own the tickets they list. The platform says it opposes bots and has called for enforcement at the primary sale stage, where tickets are first released to the public. Ticketmaster, which runs the initial sales for many major tours, says it blocks around 20 billion bots every month. It has also blamed secondary marketplaces for creating incentives that encourage resale at inflated prices, a argument that places part of the responsibility on the resale sites themselves.
The U2 shows are sold under the title The Greatest Show On Earth, and the tour has drawn heavy demand from fans across the UK. The problem is not confined to one band. Earlier in the year, RAYE saw 1.8 million people sign up for 5,000 seats at the Royal Albert Hall, and her ticketing system was overwhelmed by AI bots in October. Sam Fender also had to delay his Newcastle pre-sale after a bot attack targeted Gigantic, the ticketing system used for the sale.
The government has said it plans to ban the resale of tickets above face value. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy confirmed the plans in November 2025, and the Competition and Markets Authority has proposed fines of up to 10 per cent of a company's annual turnover for breaches. The ban is not yet law. A draft ticket tout bill was left out of the May King's Speech, a delay that the music industry has said it is disappointed by, since artists and fans have been waiting for firm rules.
Until that legislation is in place, fans seeking tickets for the U2 shows face the same market in which these listings are appearing. The case underlines the gap between the government's stated intent and the rules currently in force, and it shows how quickly high-demand sales can be targeted by both bots and resellers.