Determinants of spectator no-show behaviour: first empirical evidence from the German Bundesliga

ABSTRACT

The analysis of stadium attendance demand has a long tradition in the economic literature. However, despite its evident merits, this previous research has been critiqued at several levels, in particular for relying on a suboptimal demand proxy, i.e. published attendance data. In this short note, we address these shortcomings by exploring a highly unique data set containing official information on spectators’ decisions of whether or not to physically attend 704 German football Bundesliga games played between August 2014 and January 2017.

KEYWORDS:

• Attendance
• behavioural loyalty
• demand
• football/soccer
• game outcome uncertainty
• no-show behaviour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Throughout this research note, the term ‘football’ refers to European football, alternatively known as soccer in some areas.

² As Fort (2005) observes, Rottenberg’s seminal paper on the baseball players’ labour market ‘contained both the [invariance proposition] and the [uncertainty-of-outcome hypothesis]. But it also offered quite a complete specification of attendance demand’ (p. 355).

³ It is worth noting that more recently, a complementary stream of literature focusing on the potential determinants of football television broadcasts has emerged (e.g. Buraimo and Simmons, 2015; Cox 2018; Scelles 2017; Schreyer, Schmidt, and Torgler 2016b; Schreyer, Schmidt, and Torgler 2016c; Schreyer, Schmidt, and Torgler 2017).

⁴ As Dobson and Goddard (2011) observe, these attendance data, ‘usually announced by the home club while the match is in progress, provides the main source of data for the dependent variable in econometric models of the demand for football attendance’ (p. 322).

⁵ In addition, attendance data also include free tickets for, e.g. honory guests. Based on our data set, professional football clubs in the German Bundesliga distribute an average of 2882 free tickets per home game.

⁶ Analysing admission information for 13,892 season ticket holders of one major Bundesliga football club across the Bundesliga season 2012–13, Schreyer, Schmidt, and Torgler (2016a; 2018), for example, observe an average season ticket holder no-show rate of roughly 17%.

⁷ In fact, several European football clubs have more recently reported significant numbers of no-shows (e.g. Elberse 2015; Richter 2015), resulting in a potential loss of additional game day revenues.

⁸ Off the football pitch, the no-show phenomenon has primarily been discussed in the National Football League (e.g. Putsis and Sen 2000), e.g. while exploring the role of NFL TV blackouts in spectator no-show behaviour.

⁹ The necessary information on spectator no-show behaviour was recorded with the help of the professional football clubs’ stadium access systems and subsequently distributed to the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL). Founded in May 2001, the DFL both organizes and markets professional football in Germany.

¹⁰ Due to missing data, we eliminated 61 Bundesliga games from the sample.

¹¹ Nicolas Scelles is thanked for providing helpful advice for calculating these competitive intensity measures.

¹² To calculate APD, a well-established game outcome uncertainty-proxy (e.g. Cox 2018; Di Domizio 2010; Di Domizio and Caruso 2015; Schreyer et al., 2016b), we primarily use betting odds from the sports betting provider Interwetten, which takes its information from www.football-data.co.uk and transforms it into adjusted probabilities excluding bookmakers’ margin (cf. Benz, Brandes, and Franck 2009).

¹³ It is also worth noting that the direction of this effect is largely robust to alternative GOU proxies. For example, we observe a statistically significant, positive and linear relationship between WPH, the winning probability of the home team, and football spectator no-show behaviour suggesting that spectator demand decreases as the home team’s winning probability increases (additional specifications are available upon request from the corresponding author).

¹⁴ While we are unfortunately unable to differentiate between no-shows of season and game day ticket holders, it is likely that the former group is responsible for most of the empty stadium seats (cf., Schreyer, Schmidt, and Torgler 2016a).