The determinants of stadium attendance in elite women’s football: Evidence from the UEFA Women's Champions League

Highlights

•	Stadium attendance in the UEFA Women’s Champions League has not substantially changed in the last nine seasons.
•	Uncertainty of outcome is a key determinant of stadium attendance in women’s football.
•	Spectators of women’s football are not interested in games with a clear favourite.
•	Stadium attendance in women’s football is driven by away clubs’ reputation.

Abstract

Women’s football struggles to build a solid platform in terms of fan interest. However, while an increase in gate receipts can help assist its long-term sustainability, there is limited evidence in the academic literature on the factors influencing spectator demand in women’s football. The authors investigate determinants of stadium attendance for UEFA Women's Champions League (UWCL) matches. Using regression models deployed on 554 UWCL games played between 2009/10 and 2017/18, the authors examine contextual and sport-related variables as the main predictors of stadium attendance. Findings show that there is no continuous growth of attendance over the period examined, and highlight that spectators’ interest is positively associated with five factors: stage of the competition, uncertainty of match outcome, competitive intensity, away club’s reputation and weather conditions. Football governing bodies should put in place initiatives to ensure match outcome uncertainty is maintained as this represents a key determinant to maximise stadium attendance. Based on the specific context of European women’s football, recommendations to foster its development are discussed. These include incentivising investment into the elite women’s game and designing sport policies to encourage participation at grassroots levels.

Keywords:

• Attendance
• Demand
• Fan behaviour
• Spectators
• Women’s football

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful and constructive comments.

Notes

1 NUTS is a geocode standard for referencing the subdivisions of countries for statistical purposes in European Union member states. The classification of regions is divided into three levels: major (NUTS 1), basic (NUTS 2) and small (NUTS 3). Note that we used country’s GDP per capita for clubs that are based in non-EU countries.

2 Examples from some of the most successful women’s football clubs are presented here: Arsenal Women – the most successful English women’s football club by number of trophies - and Manchester City Women – English 2016 Women Super League winner and 2017/18 UWCL semi-finalist - charge adults £6 for all their home games (Arsenal, 2018; Manchester City, 2018); Olympique Lyon – five-times UWCL winner – charged €5 for the UWCL 16-stage return leg in 2017/18 (Olympique Lyon, 2017).

3 The Theil index as well as the probability of home team’s win and its squared term were also used simultaneously in another model (see Results and discussion section).

4 A variable controlling for integrated clubs that are not based in the Big-five and one controlling for home team supporters’ habit persistence were also tested. These provided non-significant results and are therefore not displayed in the paper. Results are available upon request.

5 Although it should be kept in mind that draws are possible in football (average adjusted probability equal to 16.8% for draws vs. 48.4% for home wins and 34.8% for away wins in our dataset).

6 More precisely, our results indicate that for every additional goal separating home and away teams after the first-leg (i.e. lower competitive intensity), stadium attendance for the second-leg game decreases of 2%. The marginal effect of uncertainty of outcome is more difficult to interpret due to the nature of the Theil measure.