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The Savannah Bananas want to disrupt the secondary market.
Bananas founder Jesse Cole, also known as the “yellow tux guy,” announced Monday that the team plans to launch its own verified secondary market before the season starts in February, where verified sellers and verified buyers can connect to exchange face value tickets.
Over the past several years, the Bananas have become a massive draw, taking their show on the road and selling out football and baseball stadiums across the country. Their 2026 tour includes the Caesars SuperDome in New Orleans, Yankee Stadium in New York, and Neyland Stadium in Knoxville. Bananas president Jared Orton said that there is a waiting list of 4 million people for next year’s tour.
The team already sells its own tickets to its games, via a lottery on its own website. Launching the secondary market is a way to make it so fans who cannot go can get matched up with buyers. Where sites like StubHub, SeatGeek, and Ticketmaster let sellers list tickets at markups and extract fees from both sides, the Bananas marketplace would enable fans to get tickets at face value—$35 to $60 apiece—without fees on either side. Markups are prohibited.
“The only way it works is if we all work together,” Cole said. “This is fans helping fans.”
Cole said he has seen fans buy fake tickets “hundreds of times” only to show up at the gate and get turned away. “It kills me every single time,” Cole said. He added that tickets listed on Facebook Marketplace or other secondary market sites are “extremely risky” and that fans who buy tickets there cannot be guaranteed entrance.
While railing against Ticketmaster and other resellers has been in the public dialogue for decades, it has typically been musical artists leading the charge.
“Ticketmaster, Live Nation, AEG: You are providing a disgusting service,” singer Olivia Dean recently wrote on her Instagram story. “The prices at which you’re allowing tickets to be re-sold is vile and completely against our wishes. Live music should be affordable and accessible and we need to find a new way of making that possible. BE BETTER.” Ticketmaster responded to the note by saying it would cap her tickets at face value and hoped for other sites to “follow suit.”
The upcoming World Cup has drawn fans’ ire for how absurdly tickets are being priced. In an extreme example, the cheapest ticket to get into the Final at MetLife Stadium on July 19 is listed for over $6,000 after fees. (Despite Cole’s pleas against outside secondary ticket marketplaces, the least expensive seats for the Bananas’ game at Wrigley Field on July 24 are listed at $349 after fees.)
In an interview with Front Office Sports earlier this year, Cole explained his philosophy in launching the Bananas.
“Where Walt Disney sat at a bench in Griffith Park with his two daughters on the carousel and said, ‘I wish there was a place where adults and kids could have fun together,’ I had a similar mindset when I was sitting and coaching in the Cape Cod League,” Cole said. “I remembered how much fun it was playing, but it wasn’t as fun watching. I thought, ‘Well, what if people that love baseball can come out and have fun just for the entertainment?’ I put myself in fans’ shoes: Even if I didn’t love baseball, could I love coming to the ballpark to experience a show?”
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