Connecticut’s history is pockmarked with the loss of major-league sports teams. The Hartford Whalers decamped to North Carolina almost three decades ago, and now the Connecticut Sun — the state’s WNBA franchise — is set to move to Houston after the 2026 season.
But at a South Windsor office campus, a homegrown company has been playing in the big leagues for years.
One major league recently made it official.
In March, TicketNetwork — the ticket resale platform co-founded in 2002 by Don Vaccaro and Doug Kruse — was designated an Authorized Ticket Marketplace by Major League Baseball, integrating it into the league’s digital ticketing system ahead of the 2026 season.
The designation allows TicketNetwork to use MLB branding, boosting its visibility in a crowded resale market dominated by larger competitors like StubHub and SeatGeek. It also routes ticket delivery through MLB’s Ballpark app, reducing the risk of fulfillment errors that have long been a challenge in secondary sales.
“As part of the relationship with MLB, there’s a certain ability to use their marks and logos on our sites,” said Kevin Lemke, TicketNetwork’s senior vice president of strategy and planning. “So it allows us to put more of an MLB foot forward.”
The new designation reflects a broader shift in how tickets are distributed and sold, as leagues take a more active role in the resale market — emphasizing verified tickets, pricing transparency and greater control over how inventory reaches fans.
It also comes as Live Nation Entertainment and its Ticketmaster unit face a high-profile antitrust case, intensifying scrutiny over how tickets move from venues to consumers.
MLB partnership
The MLB certification took roughly a year to secure and required a technical integration with the league’s infrastructure, according to Lemke.
It’s a departure from how secondary market sales worked in the past, when buyers often received forwarded QR codes or emailed PDF tickets with limited ability to verify their authenticity until arriving at the venue.
“This is a very fan-friendly program,” Lemke said. “Every ticket is verified through this program, so customers will have that trust, knowing they’ve got a barcode that’s been delivered to them in their app.”
For MLB, the arrangement is a practical solution: with 30 teams each playing 81 home games in stadiums that hold tens of thousands of fans, the league needs partners that can move tickets reliably and at scale.
That volume has made baseball more open to broader ticket distribution partnerships than other major leagues. No comparable leaguewide arrangement exists with the NFL, NBA or NHL, where resale partnerships are typically negotiated team by team, Lemke said.
The shift reflects growing acceptance among rights holders — including leagues, teams, venues and promoters — that the secondary market is a stable and legitimate distribution channel, he said.
“Rights holders are seeing a lot of value in partnering with folks in the secondary,” Lemke said. “It’s a very well-run segment of this ecosystem, and the rights holders are feeling much more confident partnering with secondary players.”
Vaccaro, TicketNetwork’s CEO, believes other leagues will follow MLB’s lead by implementing similar open distribution models rather than funneling all resale activity through an exclusive partner.
“The open distribution system that MLB is building will become the industry norm within a few years,” Vaccaro said. “I expect all venues, artists and event producers are going to embrace this kind of ubiquitous distribution model.”
Beyond the MLB deal, Vaccaro said TicketNetwork has recently seen growth in sales, revenue and profit. The company has more than 300 employees, mostly based in Connecticut.
Lemke declined to share financial figures.
Complicated backdrop
The new MLB partnership comes as the ticketing industry faces heightened legal scrutiny.
In April, a federal jury in New York found Live Nation Entertainment and its Ticketmaster unit liable on federal and state antitrust claims, siding with the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states that accused the company of maintaining a monopoly in primary ticketing.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, who joined the case, said the verdict confirms long-standing concerns that the companies “built and maintained a system that shuts out competition and drives up prices.”
A separate phase of the case will determine potential remedies, including structural changes that could reshape how tickets are distributed.
Any loosening of exclusive venue and ticketing agreements could create new openings for secondary marketplaces like TicketNetwork.
Live Nation controls several concert venues in Connecticut including the Xfinity Theatre in Hartford, Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater in Bridgeport and Toyota Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford.
TicketNetwork Director of Communications Sean Burns said the company is taking a “wait-and-see stance” on the implications of the Live Nation case, noting that any impact on competitors is likely far off.
“We’re always in support of anything that leads to a more transparent, customer-friendly and competitive marketplace,” Burns said. “The findings of the jury give us confidence that might be the direction things are heading.”
Speculative sales
Separate from the antitrust case, TicketNetwork has had its own brushes with regulatory scrutiny. In 2019, the company reached a $1.55 million settlement with the New York Attorney General’s Office over speculative ticket listings — the practice of offering tickets for sale before the seller actually possesses them.
The settlement did not ban speculative listings. Instead, it required sellers to clearly disclose when they do not yet have the tickets in hand.
“We’ve ensured that the brokers we are working with have access to the tickets,” Lemke said. “That is a requirement on the brokers — on the sellers — to have access to those tickets.”
The MLB partnership goes further, at least for baseball. Because tickets must be verified through MLB’s system before they can be listed, sellers cannot offer tickets they don’t already control — effectively eliminating speculative listings.
Outside of MLB, TicketNetwork continues to operate its established model: brokers must have access to the tickets they list, and when problems arise — which Burns says happens with less than 1% of transactions — the company makes buyers whole or removes sellers from the platform.
Vaccaro said he believes the industry is finally catching up to implied standards that existed in principle but weren’t always enforced.
“The conversation around the nature of ticket listings hasn’t always been very precise,” he said. “What’s changed is that the market has moved toward more transparency and clearer disclosure around those listings, so that consumers have more information at the time of purchase.”
