Viagogo did not create the resale industry, but we made it safer.

Paying face value for tickets to music and sporting events is an “antiquated” concept that will ultimately be replaced by airline-style surge pricing, according to the boss of controversial secondary ticketing website Viagogo.

Cris Miller, who hit the headlines after refusing to appear in front of MPs for a Parliamentary committee inquiry, said that Viagogo “didn’t create the resale market” despite criticism for selling tickets at eye-watering premiums.

The Viagogo managing director said: “If you look at the UK, prior to us launching the service, it was catastrophic. I mean, there were scams all over the place, and there are bad actors that will take advantage of people.

“And inevitably, you’re going to have a market that is created.” He said the purpose of Viagogo was “ultimately to ensure that if a fan does want to access the resale market” then there is a “good alternative” to buying from potentially risky websites.

Viagogo has enjoyed a comparatively quieter few years after becoming embroiled in a series of scandals during the 2010s.

These include the French police raiding a hotel in 2016 to target Viagogo staff handing out tickets to the summer’s European Football Championships. Later the same year it faced legal action from the England and Wales Cricket Board for advertising tickets that were not on sale. It also faced a backlash for reselling tickets to see the comedian Peter Kay, who was putting on a show in aid of Cancer Research UK.

Controversy is not something which executives have shied away from – even if this has meant more scrutiny from officials. Miller’s decision to snub MPs in March 2017, a near unprecedented move, sparked outcry within Westminster, as did threats by the company’s security guards to arrest MPs visiting Viagogo’s London office in July the same year.

In 2018, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) threatened legal action of its own to prevent Viagogo from breaching laws to protect consumers. Viagogo would later be slapped with accusations that it was “one of the worst businesses in Britain”. Asked how he would respond to this, Miller dodges the question. “We are focused explicitly on the service and all we can do is to make good on our promise and the guarantee that we have,” he says.

“Our service is only as good as the fans that use it, the sellers that use it, and there’s trust, so if it doesn’t work, then we have a problem.

“[It’s a] very emotional product to go to a sporting event that you’re dying to go to like the Ashes or a big concert, whatever it is. And so everything is about making sure that people get into these events.”

Miller does, however, seem to regret some of the hardline tactics taken by the company in the years prior to the pandemic – not least, refusing to turn up to the Department for Culture, Media and Sports committee.

“We got that one wrong. When you look back on that, you know, we were pretty naive. [We] didn’t really understand it,” he says.

“[We were] Americans that came over and started the business, and didn’t appreciate the sort of opportunity that it was to be able to explain how the service worked and answer the questions.

“Looking back on that, we got that one wrong, and we apologise for that.”

It is a reflection which suggests that Viagogo has come a long way in recent years. Still, the company itself remains firm to its original concept.

The genesis of Viagogo is a story that may have been embellished over the years. But the nub of it, Miller explains, can be traced back to the company’s founder Eric Baker and his attempt to impress a date.

Desperate to secure two tickets for The Lion King while studying an MBA at Stanford, Baker was forced to pay through the nose from a second-hand broker. Along with co-founder Jeff Fluhr, the two students set up StubHub, a website that connected buyers and sellers.

Following a falling out between the two men, StubHub was sold to eBay for £225m in 2007. Baker went on to launch Viagogo as a European rival to StubHub and, in 2021, bought back his original business for £2.9bn. The takeover was branded by Forbes as “The Worst Deal Ever” on account of it taking place during pandemic lockdowns when many live events were cancelled.

Still, throughout all this, the mission of Viagogo has remained the same, Miller says: “To unlock the world’s live entertainment catalogue to anybody anywhere.”

It is something which critics may take issue with. Some of the mark-ups on its website have been eye-watering. In 2016, £140 tickets for West End hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child were being sold for £8,327 on Viagogo. Even this week, tickets for the Ashes cricket Test at Lord’s which had a face value of £60 were selling for more than £340 a ticket.

Miller argues that “there is value on the website”. “A lot more value than I think people may appreciate. What gets the most attention is these 1pc of events. These extreme high demand events, [where there is] very limited supply inherently, just given the amount of people that ultimately want to go. That’s where most of the attention is.”

He says it should not be surprising that there are more people who want to go to a Champions League final than there are seats available.

But, about half of the tickets available on Viagogo are sold below their face value, Miller says. The face value on a ticket, he argues, is an “antiquated” concept that is now largely irrelevant.

“People are anchored to it. But if you start to look at what we’ve done as a business, it’s always a dynamically-priced industry and always a dive into a dynamically-priced market. This was happening, regardless of our website.

“The markets existed forever. And the most important thing to understand about the services is that we didn’t create the resale market, we didn’t invent it.” “Our aim was to clean it up. And our aim was to provide more security and transparency because now you can sift through the listings, you can see sellers compete with each other, you can filter an order and you can watch the market as it evolves at that point.”

Not everyone will agree. Miller and Viagogo subscribe to the type of unvarnished capitalism that even Tory ministers have rebuked.

In 2018, Margot James, then digital minister, told BBC Radio 5 Live that if fans had to use a secondary site to buy tickets, “don’t choose Viagogo – they are the worst”. The comments were made amid criticism that the company was breaking advertising rules by failing to make additional fees clear.

Miller says the company has cleaned up its act since then. “All-in prices” are now advertised with no hidden fees, for instance, he says.

“It’s a much different, more mature, business,” he adds. “With respect to the CMA, we’ve engaged with them over the past five years now.”

It seems unlikely that Miller will convince all of Viagogo’s critics. Unlike the airline industry, which has made a virtue of dynamic pricing, there is something about the secondary ticketing market that continues to sit uneasily with many Britons.

Viagogo may have evolved and “grown up” in recent years. But the fundamental concept of the business seems unlikely to change.

“At that point in time, what you have is you have a willing buyer, and you have a willing seller. And then there’s a transaction. The most important thing is the transaction is safe, and that there’s recourse if there isn’t,” Miller says.