Predicting season ticket holder loyalty using geographical information

ABSTRACT

Season ticket holders (STHs) are an integral part of the sporting product. Interestingly, and contrary to the persistent interest in analysing the determinants of stadium attendances, sports economists have so far largely refrained from exploring the potential determinants of STH loyalty as expressed through regular stadium attendances. In this article, we address this notable shortcoming by exploring the potential determinants of STH stadium attendance demand. In particular, we examine the yet under-researched role of increasing opportunity costs resulting from larger home-stadium distances in STH stadium attendance demand. Our results suggest that STHs’ geographical location plays an important role in predicting STH stadium attendance demand. More specifically, we observe an unexpected, nonlinear distance–attendance relationship, indicating that behaviourally loyal STHs live either exceptionally close or far away from the stadium.

KEYWORDS:

• Attendance
• behavioural loyalty
• demand
• football
• no-show behaviour
• season ticket holders

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• L83
• D12
• R22

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In the German Bundesliga, the second most-attended professional sporting league in the world (DFL, 2017), for example, the average price for half a litre of beer and a bratwurst is currently about €7.15 (Hartmann 2016). Assuming a STH no-show rate of only about 10%, equal to roughly 750.000 STH no-shows, Bundesliga clubs could lose up to €5.36 million in revenue per season.

² The econometric analysis of stadium attendances has a long tradition in the economic literature. In particular, analysing the determinants of football stadium attendances has attracted reasonable attention within the field (e.g. Buraimo and Simmons, 2008; Cox 2015; Falter and Pérignon 2000; Garcia and Rodriguez 2002; Jena and Reilly, 2016; Martins and Cró 2016; Pawlowski and Anders 2012; Peel and Thomas 1988; 1992; 1996; Scelles et al. 2013; Wilson and Sim, 1995).

³ To the contrary, in those few cases in which attendance data were differentiated into STHs and game day attendants, STH data were almost naturally excluded from the sample (e.g. Benz, Brandes, and Franck 2009; Garcia and Rodriguez 2002; Roy 2004). Consequently, relatively little is known about the determinants of both STH decision-making in general, and STH stadium attendance demand in particular (cf. Dobson and Goddard 2011).

⁴ In the sport management literature also, STHs are consistently characterized as a professional sporting club’s most loyal supporters (e.g. McDonald 2010; McDonald and Stavros 2007).

⁵ Please note that throughout this article the term football refers to European football, in some parts of the world also known as soccer.

⁶ In a more recent Harvard Business School case study, Javier Faus, former VP at FC Barcelona, reports that despite the implementation of a free your seat programme, ‘there are still up to 25,000 [STHs] who are reluctant to free their seats, and 2,000 rarely come to the stadium and never set their seats free’ (Elberse 2015, 6). Other clubs such as the FC Bayern Munich, Hamburger SV and also the VfL Wolfsburg have announced that they will ban frequent no-shows.

⁷ In US sports, no-shows have primarily been discussed in the National Football League (NFL; e.g. Putsis and Sen 2000; Siegfried and Hinshaw 1979; Zuber and Gandar 1988), e.g. while exploring the role of NFL TV blackouts in spectator no-show behaviour, but anecdotal evidence has it, that such behaviour is prominent in a wide variety of spectator sports around the world. That is, today’s spectators increasingly use modern mass communication tools such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter to document halls and stadiums around the globe that are sold-out, yet often empty.

⁸ In contrast, findings presented by Allan and Roy (2008) suggest that STHs following the 2002–2003 Scottish Premier League season are indeed ‘loyal and continue to attend matches irrespective of current form, whether a match is broadcast live on television, time of year, and so forth’ (299).

⁹ The necessary information on individual STH stadium attendance was recorded with the help of the professional football club’s stadium access system. The data were collected by the respective club at various times during the 2012–2013 campaign (17 home games).

¹⁰ Using MyGeoPosition.com, the geographical information of all 13 892 STHs were first manually geocoded. These data were then represented in a heat map using mapsdata.co.uk.