Live football and tourism expenditure: match attendance effects in the UK

ABSTRACT

Research question: The inbound tourist expenditure generating role of football (soccer), particularly the English Premier League (EPL), is evaluated. An enhanced economic and management understanding of the role of regular sporting fixtures emerges, as well as quantification of their impact. Expenditure on football tickets is isolated to identify local economic spillovers outside the stadium walls.

Research methods: Using the UK International Passenger Survey, unconditional quantile regressions (UQR) are used to evaluate the distributional impact of football attendance on tourist expenditures. Both total expenditure and a new measure which adjusts expenditures for football ticket prices are considered. UQR is a novel technique which is as yet underexploited within sport economics and management and confers important methodological advantages over both ordinary least squares and quantile regressions.

Results and findings: Significant cross quantile variation is found. High spending football fans spend more, even after ticket prices are excluded. Surprisingly, spending effects owing to attendance are strongest for those who overall spend the least, confirming the role of sport as a generator of tourist expenditure. Though the attendance effect is smaller for higher aggregate spenders, there is nevertheless a significant impact across the distribution.

Implications: Distributional expenditure impacts highlight clear differentials between attendance by high and low spenders. Similar analysis is applicable to other global brands such as the National Football League (NFL), in the United States (American football) and the Indian Premier (cricket) League. The EPL's global popularity can be leveraged for achieving enhanced tourist expenditure.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourist expenditure
• football attendance
• unconditional quantile regression

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank participants at invited external seminars at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India; Faculty of Economics, University of Gdansk Poland and Coventry University, UK for useful feedback provided. The authors are responsible for all remaining omissions and errors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As well as the appendix the interested reader is also directed to the comprehensive guide to the IPS, including all questionnaires and summary outputs from press releases, available at Office for National Statistics (2015) (http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-7534-4), the study information document (ONS, 2015a) and the regular travel trends publications (ONS, 2015b).

2 For the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics respondents were asked whether their primary purpose of visiting the UK was attendance, 515 were so motivated. There were also 175 participants and 138 who were on work related visits for the Games. This total represents less than 1% of the total response from departing visitors in the 2012 dataset (Office for National Statistics, 2013).

3 Further links may be made between overall expenditure and ticket prices by assuming some degree of proportionality between the two, but such a measure would be more crude than the average approach adopted here.

4 Results based on daily expenditure, as suggested by Sun and Stynes (2006) are presented in the online supplemental note provided.

5 From $\tau =0.10$ to $\tau =0.90$, inclusive, at intervals of 0.01 there are 81 different quantiles (0.10, 0.11, 0.12 … 0.87, 0.88, 0.89, 0.90).

6 Tests between each pair of coefficients in the supplementary material.

7 Should proportional ticket pricing be considered then the lower end may remain significant but the broader conclusion of insignificance would hold.

8 Please see supplementary material.