The Determinants of Football Match Attendance Revisited: Empirical Evidence From the Spanish Football League

Abstract

An attendance equation is estimated using data on individual games played in the Spanish First Division Football League. The specification includes as explanatory factors: economic variables, quality, uncertainty and opportunity costs. We concentrate the analysis on some specification issues such as controlling the effect of unobservables given the panel data structure of the data set, the type of functional form and the potential endogeneity of prices. We obtain the expected effects on attendance for all the variables. The estimated price elasticities are smaller than one in absolute value as usually occurs in this literature but are sensitive to the specification issues.