Abstract
This article aims to analyse the impact of the main determinants of match-day stadium attendance for seven seasons—2012–13 to 2018–19—of the Italian football Serie A. The main element of novelty is that the dataset is split into three sub-categories based on the pre-season fans’ expectations to verify whether the impact of attendance determinants varies depending on teams’ expected performance. Our results—based on Tobit model regressions—identify some significant differences across the three subsets. However, the difference that seems to be the most significant revealed a common preference of Italian fans towards higher quality opponents.
Highlights
Sports economists have a long history of modelling demand at live sports events since seminal work [1,2,3]
Games were analysed starting from the third fixture of each season, as only one or two fixtures are not sufficient to differentiate among the different sporting prizes, which is instrumental to creating the variables capturing competitive intensity
The large dataset enables us to create—for the first time—three subsets to explore potential similarities and differences in the behaviour of people supporting clubs expected to have different seasonal performances. This allows a more accurate consideration of the effects of fan expectations on attendance compared to Bond & Addesa [18], where they were embedded in the model for the whole dataset
Summary
Sports economists have a long history of modelling demand at live sports events since seminal work [1,2,3]. Sports economists analyse stadium attendance following Borland and McDonald’s model, encompassing consumer preferences, economic factors, quality of viewing, sporting contest and supply capacity [4]. Among these categories of attendance determinants, Rottenberg’s [1] uncertainty of outcome hypothesis has garnered the most interest, suggesting that the more uncertain the outcome of a sporting event, the higher the interest will be [5,6,7]. The number of teams in contention for the different sub-competitions may drive match-level demand in European football rather than uncertainty-of-outcome, as proven by more recent empirical studies [12, 13, 15,16,17,18,19]
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