Abstract
Women’s soccer is more popular than ever, but match attendance is still relatively low. In order to develop sustainable revenue streams for women’s football, and help it grow further, it is necessary to understand what drives spectator’s overall demand. We explore factors that affect the overall match experience for spectators (i.e., spectator satisfaction) attending Danish women’s national soccer A-team games in the 2016 to 2019 period as a proxy for this. Using survey data gathered by the Danish Football Association (DBU) consisting of 4010 individuals and 13 matches, coupled with other match-specific data, we employ multilevel regression modelling. The results at the individual level suggest that female spectators are significantly more content with the overall match experience, while several additional factors are also important at the match-specific level, such as kick-off time and the result. Furthermore, there are indications that match significance and derby matches affect overall match experience. An important implication of these results is that they can aid national and international federations and other governing bodies in promoting women’s soccer in general, and women’s national A-team soccer specifically, in order to help the sport to become more financially viable. Although numerous initiatives have been designed to increase the attractiveness of women’s soccer, these are yet to materialize into long-term effects.
Highlights
Women’s soccer is more popular than ever, as illustrated by the high number of viewers who watched the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) Women’sWorld Cup in France in 2019. (https://img.fifa.com/image/upload/rvgxekduqpeo1 ptbgcng.pdf)
Since we focus on overall match experience and not match attendance as such, we argue that the number of previous matches attended is a reflection of the overall match experience
We suggest that age can have a negative effect on overall match experience, following the general conclusions from attendance at sporting events in general by Montgomery and Robinson [27], who refer to Lera-López et al [35], who claim that age, in general, is a negative or insignificant determinant of attendance: Hypothesis 3 (H3)
Summary
Women’s soccer is more popular than ever, as illustrated by the high number of viewers who watched the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) Women’s. Stating that “to increase visibility and commercial value, we will generate fandom around women’s football, UEFA competitions and domestic football”, understanding the driving forces behind match experience has the potential to make initiatives more effective. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to bridge this gap in the literature by providing new evidence concerning the determinants of match experience, and thereby to assist national federations in promoting women’s soccer more effectively. We present the following research question: Which factors affect the overall match experience for spectators attending the home matches of the Danish Women’s national soccer A-team for the period of 2016–2019?. Thereafter, the results are discussed in relation to the hypotheses and, conclusions are drawn where limitations and suggestions for future research are considered
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