Who has been en route to a football match or any other competitive sporting event without encountering a tout, also known as a ticket scalper? The bloody knaves are everywhere, yelling in your ears, spitting in your faces, desperately encouraging you to partake in illegal solicitation so that they can feed themselves.
The sports ticket is a highly valued item.
Those of us who have not been living under a rock know this is so and are exposed to the powerful, insidious ploy of sports' specific form of entertainment almost everyday.
Since ancient Roman times people have been seated around a field or a court only to watch the best of the best compete at the highest levels of competition.
And with the exponential increases in technological advances, now we are afforded the ability to not only view sports from our homes, but also to buy a sports ticket right from our lazy chairs.
The E-Ticket is becoming a fast and uprising phenomenon.
In the days in which people were forced to buy tickets on site, hopeful ticket purchasers would be lined for miles in hopes of procuring a ticket that gave them a glimpse of the match, even if they had to use binoculars.
People would either have to drive all the way to the stadium in order to buy the tickets on site, or they were forced to go to the local mall or ticket "middle-man," where they were still forced to play a service fee despite all of their efforts for travel and such.
  What does this mean for the rest of those affiliated with sports? Well, for most this is great news.
Yes, the service fees are still prevalent; this will probably always be.
But buying your ticket without even having to leave your chair, much less your flat, is a pretty sweet deal.
Yet one can't feel a pang of empathetic sympathy for the scalper, the tout as they say.
Soon gone will be the dodgy men who do all that they can in order to convince you that you need the seat to the game that they are holding in their hand.
Ok, sure, maybe they can be a bit frightening at times.
But won't we feel some remorse at their absence? Nostalgia even? For the rise of the E-ticket surely is the demise of the tout, if not for the convenience to us ticket buyers, than surely for the lack of business opportunity left in selling tickets on the street.
Now that we can buy tickets that have already been purchased on auction sites like E-Bay, the internet even covers those game which are sold out.
To the mighty sports ticket we bow, and under its jurisdiction the tout peasants shall wither and die.