Predicting season ticket holder no-show behaviour: more nuanced evidence from Switzerland

ABSTRACT

In this article, we contribute to the emerging literature on the potential determinants of football spectator no-show behaviour by analysing disaggregated data capturing season ticket holder (STH) behaviour outside the German market for the first time. Intriguingly, our empirical analysis of a unique panel dataset – containing distinct admission decisions made by 8,734 STHs of an established Swiss Super League club on 72 consecutive matchdays between 2013 and 2016 – suggests that the antecedents of such no-show behaviour might be contextual, despite some notable similarities across markets. For instance, although we observe a robust role of both a STH’s emerging no-show habits and his/her geographical distance to the stadium in predicting spectator no-show behaviour that is in line with previous research, we also note a more nuanced, i.e. non-linear, relationship between a STH’s age and the tendency to omit attendance on matchday. Here, using three-dimensional contour plots to represent potential interactions with age graphically, we also observe that STHs in the age cohort around 35 to 65 are more affected by barriers in the form of distance to the place of residence or temperature compared to people of retirement age, for whom there is a very robust pattern of habit.

KEYWORDS:

• Attendance
• football/soccer
• no-shows
• season tickets
• spectator sports

KEYWORDS:

• JEL CodesD12
• L83
• R22
• Z20

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank Patrick Jost (Director Marketing & Sales, FC Basel 1893 AG) and Silvan Bünder (Head of Ticketing, FC Basel 1893 AG) for their enormous support in conducting this research. Further, for helpful comments and suggestions, thanks are due to Ho Fai Chan and two anonymous referees. An earlier working paper was published as “Football spectator no-show behavior in Switzerland: Empirical evidence from season ticket holder behavior” (Schreyer and Torgler 2021).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ On a more general note, as Katz, Heere, and Melton (2019) summarize, such behavioural intentions ‘are often a poor predictor of actual behavior’ (5).

² Intriguingly, this stream of the literature originated in the late 1970s (cf., Siegfried and Hinshaw 1977, 1979) but, then abated, perhaps because the access to such behavioural data is typically (still) scarce.

³ That is, unlike the 18 German Bundesliga teams, the 10 Swiss Super League (RSL) clubs play each other four times each season in a quadruple round-robin tournament, which might affect STH decision-making. In addition, RSL stadiums, some of which were significantly expanded before the 2008 UEFA European Championship, are typically less crowded, which might affect the perceived atmosphere considerably, while matches staged in these stadiums usually feature fewer stars as approximated by transfer market values.

⁴ For major European football clubs, today, matchday income still corresponds to about 15% of total turnover (Deloitte 2020). In some leagues, most notably, Scotland (43%), Switzerland (31), the Netherlands (29), Ireland (28), Sweden (24), Israel (24), and Belgium (22) however, gate revenues often remain an even more significant part of the revenue mix (UEFA, 2020).

⁵ We chose this period of observation for two reasons: First, in Basel, ticketing executives sell season tickets at the start of each year rather than at the beginning of each season; Second, in January 2017, the management altered STH allocation numbers.

⁶ More precisely, in 2014–15, the club reached the UCL round of Last 16 and was UEL a semi-finalist and a quarter-finalist in the seasons 2012–13 and 2013–14, respectively.

⁷ According to information in the club’s official annual report (FC Basel [FCB] 2017), FCB distributed between 23,671 and 24,265 season tickets per year. Intriguingly, between the stadium opening in 2001 and the 2019, the club always distributed more than 20,000 season tickets.

⁸ All reported effects are robust to employing additional logit specifications, which are available from the authors upon request.

⁹ It is noteworthy that the reported effects from specification (03 c) are robust to the exclusion of those STHs with either zero (Pseudo R² = 0.0863) or perfect attendance (0.0865). Further, the reported effects are robust to employing alternative habit dummies capturing the omission of either only one (0.0853), three (0.0818), four (0.0766), and five (0.0699) subsequent home match(es), despite the gradually decreasing number of observations.

¹⁰ Although we employ Poisson and fractional probit regression to model the cumulated absolute number (04) and the relative share (05) of no-show appearances, respectively, all reported effects are also robust to employing alternative ordinary least squares (OLS) specifications. These additional estimates are available from the authors upon request.

¹¹ In our initial data set, we observe a similar ageing effect – a moderate increase from about 42.48 years, on average, on the first matchday in 2013 to about 43.83 years, on average, on the first matchday in 2016.

¹² During the 4-year-long period of investigation, 1 CHF was, on average, worth approximately 0.87 Euro.

¹³ For these executives, the potential disadvantages arising from STH no-show behaviour must be balanced against the main advantage of selling season tickets in the first place; i.e. mitigating a club’s financial risk via guaranteed minimum funding early in the season.