Stadium experience and word-of-mouth: a panel data analysis of national A-team men’s football matches in Denmark, 2013–17

ABSTRACT

Rationale/Purpose: In this paper we utilize unique spectator level data from fifteen Danish national men’s A-team football matches in the period 2013–17.

Design/methodology/approach: We test several regression models with our dependent variable being a scale measuring each individual respondent’s inclination to recommend national matches to friends and colleagues through word-of-mouth.

Findings: The model output identify the players’ contribution, atmosphere, and spectators’ impression of the match stewards as the most important factors driving our word-of-mouth measure in a positive direction. Other factors such as food, drinks, and toilet facilities are positive but of less importance.

Practical implications: The results indicate that among strong predictors are variables which are within the reach of management.

Research Contribution: The paper adds to existing research on spectator demand by focussing on national A-team matches.

KEYWORDS:

• National A-team games
• spectator demand
• inclination to recommend
• Denmark

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 DBU asked the authors to provide the examination following their (prior) data collection. This means that we haven not had any influence on how the surveys were formed.

2 We note that two of the matches were non-competitive (friendlies) – played against Sweden in 2014 and France in 2015. However, we chose to include these in the analysis as the opponents are very important to Denmark. Sensitivity models excluding these two matches (not reported, but available upon request) yielded substantially similar results to our main analysis.

3 Some questions were not asked in all matches.

4 In some sense this study expresses the usefulness of cooperating with industry partners on collecting data for research to the benefit of both. On the one hand the data provides a unique research opportunity for scientists to understand how specific areas of the sport management industry work. On the other hand, the industry can use a research partner to get deeper into their data than would have been possible without the corporation. In terms of limitations, future research partnerships should aim to work together on forming the data collection process as well to reach a broader set of spectators thereby strengthening the findings.