To Play or Not to Play? What Drives Girls’ and Women’s Participation in Football?

Abstract

The growing attention to women’s football is reflected in the rising number of female players. This article quantifies factors driving participation in girls’ and women’s football. First, a stated preference method explores organization-related factors. Second, a revealed preference method analyzes the factors that influence the personal decision to consider, start and stop playing football. Data of 438 women and 394 men, aged between 8 and 66 years, are used, allowing for different comparisons. The presence of female referees, staff members and friends in the team, as well as playing outdoors and having positive peer support attracts more girls and women to play football. Moreover, it is necessary to offer women’s football at nearby locations, in a mix of recreational and competitive settings and with both women-only and mixed teams. The results give rise to specific recommendations and actions for policymakers. Moreover, resulting changes in female football participation probability are calculated.

Keywords:

• Female sports participation
• discrete choice experiment
• stated preference
• logistic regression
• revealed preference

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dirk De Corte, Matthieu De Wolf and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve previous versions of this paper. We are also very grateful to the RBFA Knowledge Centre for their support, and to the respondents for their participation. All remaining errors are ours.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wout Hardy

Wout Hardy (MSc., University of Antwerp) is a student-researcher at the University of Antwerp. His research interests include sports economics, marketing and management.

Matteo Balliauw

Matteo Balliauw (Ph.D., University of Antwerp, Belgium) is a researcher at the University of Antwerp. He obtained the Dean’s Award for the Best Master Student in Business Engineering. His Master’s Thesis was awarded the ORBEL Thesis Award 2014, issued by Operations Research Belgium. His research interests include sports economics, marketing and management and his work has appeared in various journals.

Jonas Vandenbruaene

Jonas Vandenbruaene (Ph.D., University of Antwerp, Belgium) is a researcher at the University of Antwerp. His research interests include financial economics, behavioral finance and sports economics. He has published in journals such as the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics and the Journal of Sports Economics.