Habs fans hoping to cheer on their team at outdoor watch parties advertised as free are now having to pay after resellers snapped up limited tickets and listed them for sale on Facebook.
With the Montreal Canadiens in the playoffs for another year, the team is holding watch parties outside the Bell Centre next week for the first two home games in the series against the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Though the Canadiens didn’t require tickets for similar events during last year’s playoffs, this year’s event will only be open to fans who secured tickets online.
The free tickets the team issued were snapped up in seconds, said David Dubé, who managed to get his hands on tickets to both watch parties.
But soon after the sale closed, “some people were trying to resell them,” he said.
A listing on Facebook Marketplace offers four of the supposedly free tickets for $75 each. A screenshot circulating online shows another listing offering two tickets at $50 each.
Tickets for a Montreal Canadiens watch party, initially advertised as a free event, were listed on Facebook Marketplace for $75 as part of a reselling operation in April 2026. Facebook
In Facebook groups dedicated to resales, fans are asking for tickets to the event, with others offering to sell them.
“I was disappointed” to see free tickets resold, Dubé said. The Canadiens “are a religion for a lot of people and it kind of sucks that the average person who was working (when the tickets were distributed online) will now have to pay 50 or 100 bucks,” he said.
Other fans are also upset.
“It’s so unfair,” one user wrote on Reddit. “Last year wasn’t like that at all.”
“You have to be pathetic to sell tickets to a free event,” another wrote.
To prevent resales, organizations could require “names to be printed on tickets” and verify ID at the door, said HEC Montréal arts marketing professor François Colbert. But such a measure would prevent people who can’t attend events from giving tickets away for free, he said.
As it stands now, Quebec has no regulatory protections against ticket resales, Colbert said.
In December, the Coalition Avenir Québec government tabled a bill aiming to prevent ticket resales above their face value, but Colbert said the bill is unlikely to prevent free tickets from being resold on Facebook.
Asked Tuesday whether the city would offer its own watch parties during the playoffs, Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada said she was “already in touch with” the Montreal Canadiens.
“It’s a question of cost,” she said, responding to a question at a Ville-Marie borough council meeting. “Because there are broadcast rights,” she said, as well as set-up and security costs.
The Gazette has contacted the Montreal Canadiens for comment.
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I’ve reported for The Gazette since 2024. I love covering a good politics story, but any day I tell Montrealers something new about the world around them feels like a good one. Got a tip for me? Email me at jawilson@postmedia.com