Insights for clubs from modelling match attendance in football

The paper employs data from 2884 matches in the English Football League Championship. It builds a model of determinants of attendance designed to yield results relevant to decision-taking at individual clubs. The model has two innovatory features. It controls for the market size of home and away tea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Operational Research Society 2009-02, Vol.60 (2), p.147-155
Main Authors: Buraimo, B, Forrest, D, Simmons, R
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Attendance
Business and Management
Consistent estimators
Decision making models
Dependent variables
Estimators
Exact sciences and technology
General Paper
Instrumental variables estimation
Management
Market size
Media rights
Operational research. Management science
Operations research
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Population
Population estimates
Population size
Professional soccer
regression
Revenue sharing
Soccer
Sports
Sports clubs
statistics
Studies
Television programs
Variables
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Summary:The paper employs data from 2884 matches in the English Football League Championship. It builds a model of determinants of attendance designed to yield results relevant to decision-taking at individual clubs. The model has two innovatory features. It controls for the market size of home and away teams precisely by including local population measures constructed from the application of GIS software and information on competition from other clubs. It incorporates these time-invariant covariates in a Hausman-Taylor random effects estimator to take explicit account of variables typically excluded in earlier studies based on fixed effects models. Unlike fixed effects results, Hausman-Taylor estimates permit assessment of the role of market size and quality of the playing squad in determining attendance. Results also quantify the reduction in attendance from televising a match and show that attendance diminishes when a match is played simultaneously with a televised game in a higher status competition.
ISSN:0160-5682
1476-9360
DOI:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602549