Can international elite sport success trickle down to mass sport participation? Evidence from Danish team handball

Abstract

Many scholars do not find evidence of a trickle-down effect from elite sport success to mass sport participation. Contrary to what is assumed by the trickle-down effect “theorem”, successful elite sportspeople do not seem to inspire amateurs to take up sport themselves. However, recent studies present evidence that elite sport can have an influence. In this article, we apply regression models on time series data from one of the most successful Danish sports, team handball. Our findings are mixed, but lean towards supporting scholars who argue that trickle-down effects are not necessarily an inherent part of international sporting success. Further studies should examine more sports to identify where trickle-down effects occur and why.

Keywords:

• Trickle-down effects
• elite sport success
• mass participation
• team handball
• Denmark

JEL Classification:

• l83
• d62
• d12

Acknowledgements

The authors thank author, commentator and Danish handball expert Thomas Ladegaard for helping them identifying Danish handball star players in the period covered. His expertise is the basis for our Personality’s variable. They also thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The work was carried out in association with a Danish evaluation aimed at analysing the potential of elite sporting events in encouraging mass participation in specific sports.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our period covers 1964–2016 as these data are updated and available. Data prior to 1964 – according to DHF – contain significant counting errors, and are thus excluded from the study. In 2016, there were respectively 15,857 (1964: 22,105) adult males, 16,599 (1964: 12,404) adult females and 72,577 (1964: 51,956) child members of DHF.

2 In order to take into account potential lagged effects in other years where the championships have taken place earlier in the year, we have also run models with lagged results for all years, revealing the same results as our reported findings.

3 It should be mentioned here that it is a potential limitation of this study that separate data on girls and boys does not exist. According to Biskup and Pfister (2009), girls and boys are likely to be affected by international sporting success or role models differently.

4 In addition, and for robustness, we have run OLS models using percentage change as well as models including time trend and lagged dependent variables (similar to Frick & Wicker, 2016) reaching the same overall conclusions as presented in the results section (these specific results are not reported here, but are available upon request).

5 The Dickey–Fuller tests show that our dependent variables contain time trends, and the residuals show that the non-stationarity on the dependent and independent variables are not co-integrated (Bhaskara, 2007).