Stadium attendance demand during the COVID-19 crisis: early empirical evidence from Belarus

ABSTRACT

In this note, we consider early evidence regarding behavioural responses to an emerging public health emergency. We explore patterns in stadium attendance demand by exploiting match-level data from the Belarusian Premier League (BPL), a football competition that kept playing unrestricted in front of spectators throughout the global COVID-19 pandemic, unlike all other European professional sports leagues. We observe that stadium attendance demand in Belarus declined significantly in the initial period of maximum uncertainty. Surprisingly, demand then slowly recovered, despite the ongoing inherent risk to individuals from going to a match.

KEYWORDS:

• Attendance
• COVID-19
• football/soccer
• spectator decision-making
• public health

JEL:

• D12
• D81
• D90
• H12
• I18
• L83
• Z20

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful discussions and comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker ranked Belarus as having the least strict measures apart from Nicaragua (cf., Hale et al. 2020).

² Matchday income, i.e. revenue from ticket sales, as well as from concessions, parking fees etc., corresponds to about 15% of the total turnover of major European football clubs (Deloitte 2020). For sports economists, understanding the potential determinants of football stadium attendance demand better has, therefore, become a priority in the last decades. A large body of literature models stadium attendances in, for example, England (e.g. Cox 2018), France (e.g. Scelles et al. 2013), Germany (e.g. Pawlowski and Anders 2012), Italy (e.g. Domizio and Caruso 2015), and Spain (e.g. Buraimo and Simmons 2009). In contrast, only a few authors (e.g. Pawlowski and Nalbantis 2015) have explored the demand for small football leagues, where gate revenues are normally an even more significant part of the revenue mix (Union des Associations Européennes de Football [UEFA] 2020a).

³ As Reade and Singleton (2020) add, this finding might at least partially stem from the use of aggregated data on the number of distributed tickets, most of them part of a season ticket bundle, that are typically administered well in advance of a match and, thus, might ultimately capture intent rather than actual behaviour (cf., Schreyer 2019).

⁴ As the BPL is currently running from March to late November/early December, throughout the manuscript, we use the terms season and year synonymously.

⁵ According to the CNN, in mid- April 2020, only five out of FIFA’s 211 national associations were still running a football competition: Belarus, Burundi, Nicaragua, Tajikistan, and Taiwan (CNN, 2020).

⁶ As European football leagues are increasingly seeking international broadcasting presence to diversify their income mix (e.g. Schmidt and Holzmayer 2018), the sale of additional international media rights marks a significant, though probably temporary, competitive advantage for the BPL. Although we are not aware of the generated income, such additional revenue, as one reviewer has rightly pointed out, is likely to have a significant effect on the league’s development. In the English Premier League, for example, the revenue from international media rights was about 40% recently (e.g. Schreyer, Schmidt, and Torgler 2018).

⁷ Author’s own calculations based on data from worldfootball.net.

⁸ We consider the year 2016 a natural starting point for our analyses, as the number of participating teams (16) was lower in the preceding year(s).

⁹ In the final analysis, however, we had to exclude 17 games. In 2020, two games featuring FC Minsk had to be rescheduled due to suspected cases of COVID-19 among the squad (Reuters 2020b). As of today, these matches have not been rescheduled. Further, in 2019, Torpedo Minsk withdrew from the BPL due to a lack of financial resources and their remaining matches were forfeited in favour of their opponents.

¹⁰ The official information on active COVID-19 cases, as well as on recoveries and deaths, were obtained from Wikipedia. Although the official numbers have sparked some scepticism among independent journalists, not least because the President of Belarus declared that nobody would die there from COVID-19 in mid-April (e.g. Reuters 2020d), it is, ultimately, the only major information available to a spectator during his/her decision-making process. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democracy Index 2019 (EIU, 2020), Belarus, classified as Authoritarian regime, ranks 150 out of 167 countries, that is, slightly above China (153) but below Russia (134).

¹¹ For examples of the few stadium attendance demand studies employing behavioural data see Sacheti, Paton and Gregory-Smith (2016), Schreyer, Schmidt, and Torgler (2016), and Welki and Zlatoper (1999).