Decision-making in professional football: an empirical analysis of club members’ voting behaviour

ABSTRACT

Research question

Despite significantly increasing membership in professional football clubs over time, few members exercise their right to vote. We explore whether factors found to influence turnout to shareholder voting and political elections are also relevant in this peculiar setting. Given the geographically widespread distribution of members, a particular focus is put on the relevance of travel distance to the meeting place.

Research methods

Data come from an online survey of n = 9090 voting-eligible members of one of the biggest football clubs in Germany. A member’s ‘habit for voting’ serves as dependent variable in our regression models. Given the ordinal nature of this variable, ordered probit models were estimated which allow addressing the size and relevance of non-instrumental benefits from voting.

Results and findings

Next to some setting-specific variables, we find that several socio-demographic characteristics have statistically significant effects on the members’ habit for voting. Also in line with the general voting literature, the distance between one’s home and the meeting place is significantly and negatively related to the probability of voting. Remarkably, however, this effect is hardly big enough to materially change the habit for voting.

Implications

Our study provides some evidence of ‘temporal consistency’ and ‘setting independency’ for the factors associated with voter turnout. At the same time, it illustrates a practically highly relevant case where statistical and economic significance of a variable differ. Since the effect of distance between one’s home and the meeting place is comparably small, online voting or voting by mail might have little impact on turnout in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-determination
• football
• governance
• participation
• voting

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this manuscript were presented at the 28th EASM European Virtual Sport Management Conference, the 90th Annual Meeting of the Southern Economic Association in New Orleans, LA (USA), and the 24th Virtual Annual Meeting of the German Association of Sport Economics and Sport Management. We would like to thank the conference participants for their valuable comments and suggestions. Moreover, we thank the associate editor, as well as two anonymous referees for their guidance and help in improving the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For instance, the biggest club, FC Bayern Munich, has almost 300 thousand members while clubs like Borussia Dortmund or FC Schalke 04 have about 160 thousand members each.

2 Responsibilities of AGMs include electing board members and auditors, controlling and approving the board’s actions and, if applicable, other organs (e.g. councils, advisory boards, committees), accepting annual reports provided by the board, amending the statutes and bylaws, setting the amount of membership fees (including budget decisions), or deciding about mergers with other clubs and the dissolution of the club. While board elections and/or important and eventually controversial agenda items might generally trigger participation at AGMs (Thiel et al., 2006), evidence, for instance, from AGMs of the club in the focus of our analysis suggests, that only about 2% of eligible voters attend the meetings.

3 Blais (2006) reviews evidence on the effects of socio-economic environment and institutional factors on turnout from a cross-national research perspective. In this respect, for example, it appears evident that turnout is lower in poor countries, while it is higher in small ones and those with compulsory voting systems.

4 Such costs include, for example, educating oneself on the issues to be voted on, the time and costs of transportation to the polling station, and the time spent waiting to enter the voting booth.

5 HSV offers competition and training in 30 sports. Club members get voice and vote, as well as season tickets to the football matches at member prices, priority access to tickets for top home and away matches, and discounted travel packages to away matches.

6 Further details about the data gathering process as well as the data description are available in Burk et al. (2016) well as Nalbantis et al. (2017).

7 2,100 (23.1%) reported seldom attending the AGMs while 4,586 (50.4%) reported never attending them.

8 Overall, 100 random samples of 168 out of the 882 individuals reporting to often attend AGMs were combined with all the other observations in order to form 100 estimation samples of 8,376 observations. Each of these samples matches the 2% of eligible voters attending the AGMs on average. Estimations with each of the 100 samples suggest that very few of the coefficients from the full sample (as reported in Table 3) are much different than the average values of those coefficients from the random samples (results are available on request).

9 For a direct comparison with the voting literature on single elections binary probit models were estimated with two different specifications for the dependent variable as well as with and without the activity variables (see Table A1 in the supplementary material). The coefficient estimates are little different compared to the ordered probit models.

10 For instance, Highton and Wolfinger (2001) or Stoker and Jennings (1995) find that marriage comes along with new demands and priorities inhibiting political involvement. Likewise, comparably high income might proxy the opportunity costs of taking the time to vote (Cebula & Toma, 2006).

Additional information

Funding

Data was collected in a funded project by Hamburger Sport-Verein e.V. (HSV). We would like to thank the club officials for their support with regard to the data collection.