Seat view data is used to price seats, not to fix them

Venues now know exactly which seats have a compromised view, and that knowledge mostly ends up in the pricing engine.

Modern ticketing systems know, seat by seat, what you can actually see. Photographic surveys, three-dimensional models of the bowl, and increasingly the complaint history attached to individual rows: it is all there, and it is granular. The question is what a venue does with it, and the answer at most is that it feeds the pricing tiers rather than any programme to make bad seats better.

That is a defensible commercial choice and a poor one for the sport. A seat with a stanchion through the goalmouth gets discounted, sold to somebody who did not read carefully, and generates an annual quota of angry supporters who conclude the club was happy to take their money. The discount is treated as the disclosure. It is not, particularly when the resale market strips whatever warning the original listing carried.

Dynamic pricing has sharpened this. When a seat's price moves with demand, its price no longer signals its quality, so the one crude piece of information a buyer used to have is gone. A restricted view in a big fixture can now cost more than an excellent seat in a quiet one, and the buyer has no way to tell without doing homework the club could have done for him.

I would put the obligation on the seller. Any seat with a known obstruction should be labelled as such in the listing, at every point of sale including authorised resale, with a photograph taken from that seat. This is not technically hard. Several venues already hold the photographs and use them internally.

There is a design consequence too, and it is the one that annoys me. Once a venue can price around bad sightlines, the pressure to design them out weakens. Structural columns and awkward corner geometry become a revenue-management problem rather than an architectural failure, and the next stadium gets built with the same compromises because the model shows the seats still sell.

They do still sell, every week, to somebody new who does not know the row. That is not the same as them being worth what was paid for them.