1 ticket: you can only sell back, no name change. You’re solo, not going with anyone, this works.

2 tickets: you can either sell them both back, OR change ONLY one name once. This means you have the option of buying two tickets up front, before you lock-in your companion.

It works well, I’ve experienced this for festival tickets.

you can buy 1 ticket, but then you can't change the name.

It does not prevent scalpers altogether, but it makes it harder and less profitable.

Generally, people do not want to go to an event alone, you'd go with a friend, partner, spouse, whatever.

So the scalper's profitability calculation goes from "buy 10 tickets for 100$ and sell them at 10x price to anyone" to "buy 2 tickets and sell 1 of them at less than 10x to people who want to attend the event alone". The profitability went from 10000 to less than 80.

It helps make it difficult to do scalping at scale. They can't reliably sell seats next to people. Always having to pay people their cut to use their name means the refund mechanism is still costly to the scalper.

It doesn't have to be perfect to be effective.

I can’t imagine the overlap between football fans and people who like to attend football games alone is big enough to matter.