Football spectator no-show behaviour in the German Bundesliga

ABSTRACT

Despite an extensive literature on stadium attendance demand, our understanding of those factors shaping spectator no-show behaviour is rudimentary at best. Here, we explore such behaviour by using a comprehensive two-step approach: First, we examine the determinants of no-show behaviour in the German Bundesliga between the four seasons 2014–15 and 2017–18; Second, because our initial results imply that spectator no-show behaviour is more prominent among season ticket holders (STHs), we exploit additional survey data to understand individual STH no-show appearances better. Our results suggest that club managers interested in reducing the no-show rate should rethink existing season ticket strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Attendance
• demand
• football/soccer
• no-shows
• spectator decision-making
• spectator sports

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D12
• L83

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ In 2018, even Pope Francis had to observe a large number of no-shows (Cable News Network [CNN] 2018; cf., Independent 2018) when about half a million ‘people were expected to attend the papal Mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park […], but aerial photos of the ticketed event appear to show a much smaller turnout’ (Cable News Network [CNN] 2018; cf., Independent 2018).

² Although industry no-show rates are often hard to obtain, there exists plenty of anecdotal evidence. In Ireland, for example, the Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI) has argued that, over Christmas 2017, roughly a fifth of bookings in the average restaurant failed to show up (The Irish Times 2018).

³ Based on a small survey among airline economists, DeKay, Yates, and Toh (2004) estimate a no-show rate of about 8 percent. American Airlines, in contrast, estimated that roughly 15 percent of seats on sold-out flights would be empty without overbooking (Smith, Leimkuhler, and Darrow 1992).

⁴ In England, for example, the National Health Service (NHS) registered about 2.90 m missed patient appointments between January and June 2018 (Daily Mail Online 2018), resulting in longer waiting times for millions of patients in need. In fact, in the healthcare industry, outpatient no-show-rates often exceed 15 percent (for a systematic review see, for example, Dantas et al. 2018).

⁵ At the other end of the spectrum of the political business, in the German Bundestag, for example, during both the 17^th and the 18^th legislative period, the politician no-show rate during polls (as opposed to show of hands) was about 8 percent (e.g. Spiegel Online 2014).

⁶ Note that, throughout this manuscript, the term football refers to European football.

⁷ Also, in the English Premier League (EPL), police and council figures regularly differ from the official published attendance as first evidence gathered by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] 2018) suggests.

⁸ On a related note, Page, Savage, and Torgler (2018), in a more recent working paper, detect clear evidence for a potential misreporting of such published attendance figures in EPL, MLB, and the Nation Rugby League (NRL), indicating that ‘clubs inflate their attendance numbers, in particular, to declare attendance above significant thresholds in terms of thousands and tens of thousands of spectators’ (2).

⁹ Here, a season ticket is therefore equivalent to 17 game day tickets.

¹⁰ Unfortunately, not all Bundesliga clubs were using a reliable electronic stadium access system during the complete period of our empirical investigation. Accordingly, after thoughtful consultation with DFL ticketing officials, data from these clubs were excluded from our final sample. Further, in the final analysis (cf., Tables 2, 3, and 4 additional games were excluded from the sample using listwise deletion due to missing data points.

¹¹ Unlike Schreyer and Däuper (2018), here, we present mean values before listwise deletion due to missing data points.

¹² While we proxy game outcome uncertainty based on adjusted probabilities after excluding the bookmakers’ margin (cf., Benz et al. 2009), a more recent stream of research has begun exploring perceived outcome uncertainty (e.g. Pawlowski, Nalbantis, and Coates 2018).

¹³ In line with most recent research exploring the determinants of football demand (e.g. Bergmann and Schreyer 2019; Serrano et al. 2015; Wallrafen et al. 2018), information on player market values was obtained from the website transfermarkt.de; i.e. ‘an online platform where a crowd of registered users assess the value of professional soccer players’ (Peeters 2018, 17). Prockl and Frick (2018) conclude that these market values are appropriate proxies for otherwise undisclosed player salaries.

¹⁴ It is worth noting that employing fractional probit regression as an additional robustness test does not change the overall tone of the results presented here. These additional specifications are available from the authors upon request.

¹⁵ As mentioned earlier, in Table 4 we also present detailed information on the potential role of kick-off times in shaping football spectator no-show behaviour. As can be seen from this Table, the much-debated role of kick-off times in shaping football stadium attendance demand seems to some degree exaggerated, at least for those fixtures scheduled during the weekend. Interestingly, we observe that no-show behaviour is minimized for Bundesliga games scheduled at Saturday, 6:30 PM. In contrast, midweek games, in particular, Bundesliga games planned at Wednesday, 8:30 PM, are likely to suffer from comparatively high numbers of no-shows. This negative reaction is at least surprising, given that both DFB and UEFA use this kick-off time almost routinely in their domestic and international football cup competitions. On a related matter, our finding might also help explaining why ‘the usual home advantage disappears when the game is in the middle of the week instead of being on the weekend’ (Krumer and Lechner 2018, 193).

¹⁶ Note that STH no-show behaviour, in particular, is most likely to produce overstaffing, as well as to result in a significant loss of income because football clubs sell fewer food and beverages, merchandise and parking tickets (cf., Schreyer et al. 2018a).

¹⁷ In the Bundesliga, about 10 percent of all available seats are reserved for away fans.

¹⁸ In total, our questionnaire contained a maximum of 139 questions and was available on the website of the kicker sport magazine, Germany’s leading sports magazine, for about a week (cf., Schmidt, Schreyer, and Krüger 2019). Overall, 6,178 respondents answered all questions. Thereof, 883 respondents held a Bundesliga season ticket.

¹⁹ In Germany, unlike in, for example, England, football stadiums still have large terraced areas.

²⁰ In the specifications (03) to (07) we exclude those STHs living abroad.

²¹ As it is to the public, there is only one Bundesliga club, Bayern Munich, that is able to sell out every home game. Accordingly, the club has begun to engage in overbooking activities (Smart Pricer 2018).

²² As one reviewer has rightfully pointed out, these STHs seem to be willing to also pay a higher price for those specific games.

²³ As one reviewer has argued, an alternative recommendation could be to reduce the transaction costs that currently occur to STHs that are interested in re-selling their ticket before an unwanted Bundesliga game. We believe, however, that such an approach is only feasible if demand exceeds supply on a regular basis or, in other words, if a club sells out the stadium regularly (which is obviously not true for most Bundesliga clubs). In fact, as long as tickets are still available to the public at the regular price, the incentive for professional sporting clubs to reduce transaction cost for re-selling heavily discounted tickets on the secondary ticket market is low, despite the existence of no-shows. Nevertheless, it is, however, worth noting that some clubs experiment with applications such as Keyper, that provides technology for secure and easy sharing and selling of tickets (Ticket Business News 2018).

²⁴ Anecdotal evidence suggests that an increasing number of German professional football clubs began exploring the effectiveness of measures to reduce football spectator no-show behaviour (e.g. Daily Mail Online 2014; Hamburger Abendblatt 2017; Kicker 2015). Borussia Dortmund, for example, has only recently begun to withdraw season tickets holders with more than seven no-show appearances the right of first refusal for season tickets (Ruhr Nachrichten 2018). Former Bundesliga club FC Kaiserslautern, in contrast, experimented with using a raffle to reduce STH no-show behaviour (Wochenblatt 2019).