Man Utd mascot, six, hit by club's ticket tout crackdown

A family of 3 stand in a stadium, which is filling up, smiling to a camera on matchday.

Image source, Family photoImage caption,

Katie said Ruairi has held a season ticket since birth

ByHaider SaleemNorth West

Published34 minutes ago

A mother has said her six-year-old son has had restrictions put on his Manchester United season ticket as part of the club's anti-touting crackdown.

Katie, 39, from Urmston, Trafford, said she had been left unable to apply for an away game ticket for her "football daft" son Ruari - who had once been a match mascot - ahead of the Premier League opener against Hull.

In an email seen by the BBC, the club said repeated access to Ruairi's account, alongside an "extremely high" number of other ticketing accounts, indicated they had been centrally controlled.

But Katie - who said her appeal to the club had been turned down - said she had just helped other family members to use their accounts and had done nothing wrong.

Ruari is among "thousands" of fans who have had their accounts restricted by the club in a wider operation aimed at identifying potential ticket touts.

Man Utd previously said it was confident the "vast majority" of accounts identified for misuse had been correctly flagged, but acknowledged some supporters who were doing nothing wrong might also have been affected.

Katie said she had lodged a further appeal with the club's appeals panel, but Ruari's account remains restricted.

Katie stands at the edge of a football pitch, with Ruairi on her shoulders. Both are smiling.

Image source, Family photoImage caption,

Katie's son Ruari has had his season ticket restricted as part of a touting crackdown

Katie said Ruairi had held a season ticket since birth and regularly attended home, away and European matches with his family.

Supporting Man Utd was "all we do", she said, adding that she met her husband at Old Trafford and had held her own season ticket for nearly 20 years, along with her late mother and siblings.

"Since [Ruari] could walk, he's had a ball at his feet," she said. "He's just football daft."

Katie said Ruairi had been a United mascot at Crystal Palace last season and had travelled to watch the team in Seville, Istanbul and Bilbao.

A post on X, in which Katie said the restriction would "break [Ruari's] heart", has been viewed more than 1.3 million times.

She said she had not told him about the restriction because "you can't put that on a six-year-old".

"The first game of the season, we're definitely going to miss," she said.

"I looked at his dad and said, 'How can you take that away from him?'"

A group of seven supporters at Old Trafford, all in the same row, smile for the camera. At the front is Katie, her husband and Ruairi.

Image source, Family photoImage caption,

Katie said she handled away ticket applications for the group of 19 because deadlines were tight and she worked from home

Family accounts

Katie said 19 relatives and friends had formed a group so they could sit together in a singing section at Old Trafford.

She said she handled much of their ticket administration, including away applications, while family members helped one another manage accounts using shared devices and internet connections.

Some relatives were less confident using online ticketing systems, she said.

Katie's appeal challenges restrictions on six family accounts.

In it, she said no tickets had been sold for profit, advertised or supplied to unauthorised third parties, and no automated software, bots or scripts had been used.

She said that when family members had been unable to attend one or two matches, their tickets had been forwarded through Man Utd's official system.

Image shows Ruari standing with Man Utd goalie Senne Lammens in front of the stands.

Image source, Family photoImage caption,

Ruari has been a mascot for the club in the past

The club's decision email said applying with other supporters and using its official forwarding process had not, by itself, been treated as evidence of wrongdoing.

However, it said the "scale, frequency and pattern" of the wider activity had not been satisfactorily explained.

The club concluded that Ruairi's account and its associated tickets had been put under another person's control and used or managed outside its authorised processes.

The email did not expressly accuse the family of reselling tickets or using bots.

Man Utd told Katie on the afternoon of 21 July that the restriction would remain, about four hours after she first sent her explanation.

The email said the decision followed a "detailed review" of the information she provided and the club's investigation.

Katie said she believed it was an "AI automated rejection" because it arrived so quickly and appeared to use the same wording as responses received by other supporters.

Man Utd declined to comment on Ruari's case.

But the club said similar anti-touting work last season recovered more than 14,000 tickets worth more than £1m and returned them to supporters through official channels.