A hedge fund operated by StubHub's CEO Eric Baker has been quietly purchasing large blocks of tickets from three high profile005 Major League Baseball teams that are then sold on the StubHub platform, as well as other competing marketplaces like SeatGeek and Vivid Seats.

For the last decade, Andro Capital has been part of a growing consolidation movement in professional sports to help teams exert greater control over how their tickets are priced and resold on the secondary market. Ever since the launch of sites like StubHub in the 2000s, professional teams have carefully monitored how their tickets are priced on resale sites. A broker significantly marking down a pair of tickets to an unpopular or slow game can have a significant impact on the team's own ability to sell similar tickets directly from the box office. After all — why would a fan spend $50 per ticket from the team when they can find a broker online willing to offload the bad games at steep discounts.

Brokers are often forced to buy tickets to less desirable games in order to get access to purchase tickets for the more popular home games featuring local rivalries and big ticket matchups. In fact, some brokers make the bulk of their tickets in the playoffs and don't really care what the regular season tickets will generate, especially if they know the team has a shot of going deep into the World Series.

Again, that's a challenge for teams who don't want to see the tickets they're selling at the box office compete against tickets marked down by brokers looking to make a few bucks. One solution several teams came up with in the 2010s was to limit the number of brokers the team sold tickets to. For some teams, the number of participating brokers shrunk from dozens to just one or two. Suddenly longtime mom and pop ticket brokers that operated in major cities with brick and mortar stores were seeing their access to season tickets blocked by large-scale ticket brokers capable of deploying tens of millions of dollars to buy up a team's entire secondary market, effectively controlling the price of tickets on the secondary ticket market.

It's called yield management because it seeks to maximize the profits teams can make selling their tickets from their box office by working with a highly capitalized partner with the exclusive rights to sell tickets on the team's behalf. Andro Capital is one of these companies and in recent years has used the money it raises to buy exclusive resale ticketing agreements for the New York Yankees, the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. Decibel reached out to all three teams for comment but did not receive a response.

Andro competes against other companies in the space that deploy millions of dollars to help teams maximize their ticketing revenue yield — firms like Eventellect and DTI — but Andro Capital is the only company in the space to have direct links to one of the marketplaces where tickets are bought and sold.

While critics of the arrangement between Andro and StubHub have questioned whether StubHub gives Andro more favorable terms than others on the market, sources tell Decibel that Andro doesn't just list Yankees, Giants and Cardinals tickets on StubHub and instead spreads them out on competing sites like SeatGeek and Vivid Seats. In fact, last year admins at Vivid decided to kick Andro Capital out of a program it had created for high volume sellers after it learned of the connection between Andro Capital and StubHub.

The Andro Capital arrangement remained a quiet industry open secret for years — until a CBC News investigation this month dug through StubHub's IPO filings and put the numbers in front of a much wider audience. The relationship had actually been disclosed to regulators ahead of StubHub's $758 million IPO in September 2025, but it only became broadly known after CBC published its report examining those filings in detail. Per the disclosures, Baker's fund had been selling tickets through the platform since 2008 and had generated more than $5 million in proceeds since 2022 alone. Law Commentary

The fallout was immediate. A $5 million class-action lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York by ticket buyer Louis Sanquini, arguing StubHub had marketed itself to consumers as a neutral marketplace while its own CEO held a financial stake in one of the professional sellers supplying the platform. New York attorney Hillel Parness filed what appears to be the first suit centered specifically on Baker's relationship with Andro, on behalf of a consumer who'd bought tickets to an MLS match and a KISS concert. A related suit alleges StubHub's 2024 arrangement with Colloquy Capital — an Andro affiliate — to refer sellers for short-term financing to fund bulk ticket buys was never disclosed to consumers at checkout, in marketing, or in the terms of service. Both complaints carve out claims tied to canceled or undelivered tickets, which fall under separate litigation — including the ongoing Moghal v. StubHub case stemming from this year's World Cup ticket cancellations. Front Office Sports + 2

StubHub's public response has been narrow and consistent: a spokesperson told CBC the Baker-Andro relationship "has been fully disclosed in StubHub's public SEC filings, and we don't have anything to add beyond what is in those filings." The company hasn't disputed Baker's ownership stake, Colloquy's financing role, or StubHub's part in administering those loans — its defense rests entirely on the disclosure argument, which plaintiffs counter by drawing a line between disclosure to institutional investors reading an S-1 and disclosure to a fan buying two tickets at checkout. Decibel

Washington has noticed too. Rep. Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, sent Baker a letter demanding answers over allegations of "market manipulation and self-dealing," accusing the executive of giving himself preferential treatment on his own platform at the direct expense of fans and smaller resellers. The Hollywood Reporter

For an industry that's spent a decade consolidating access to the secondary market in the name of "yield management," Andro Capital may end up being the case study that finally forces a public reckoning — not just for StubHub, but for every marketplace that has quietly financed the very brokers it claims to police.