Estimation of game-level attendance in major league soccer: Outcome uncertainty and absolute quality considerations

Abstract

Hipótesis de la incertidumbre de resultado en deportesEste trabajo presenta la revisión de estudios empíricos, que pusieron a prueba la Hipótesis de la Incertidumbre del Resultado propuesta por Rottenberg (1956), en diferentes deportes y con grupos particulares de espectadores. En primer lugar, se revisan los aspectos teóricos relativos a la Hipótesis de la Incertidumbre del Resultado, el equilibrio competitivo, la incertidumbre del resultado del juego, los determinantes de la asistencia a los deportes, entre otros. Además, considera siete artículos empíricos seleccionados críticamente y los compara en función de variables y resultados compartidos. Este trabajo explora investigaciones realizadas en la Liga Nacional de Hockey, el fútbol alemán, el béisbol coreano, la Major League Soccer, el fútbol holandés y el críquet. El análisis de esta selección concluye con que la mayoría de los estudios rechazan la Hipótesis de la Incertidumbre del Resultado, aunque no represente una conclusión sólida debido a la diversidad de deportes y grupos analizados.

The impact of race relations on NFL attendance: An econometric analysis

“…Similarly, the results for the stadium age variable were negative and significant, indicating that fans preferred to attend games for teams that played in newer stadiums. Furthermore, stadium age squared was positive and significant in all models, indicating a concave relationship between stadium age and attendance as is commonly found in studies of sport demand [74,56,75].…”

“…First, in considering the performance of teams, studies of attendance in the NFL and other sport leagues have used a variety of metrics to capture the quality of contests, including the percentage of games won [53], the number of points scored by the home team [54], as well as the home team record [55]. As the quality of the home and away team may play a role in determining fan interest in attending games [56], we utilize the lagged win percent for both the home (HomeWPCTLag) and away (AwayWPCTLag) teams. The use of a lagged variable accounts for the fact that fans are not aware of the outcome of a game when they purchase tickets, and thus the decision to attend games are likely driven by prior team performance.…”

“…Similarly, because the construction of new stadiums can also have a novelty effect, we measure the age of the stadium hosting a game (StadiumAge), as well as included the square of stadium age (StadiumAgeSq) to consider whether the effect of age changes over time. These two stadiums variables are commonly used in empirical models estimating attendance in professional sport leagues, as it has been found that there is a concave relationship between stadium age and attendance [60,56]. That is, sport fans have been shown to have a preference for new stadiums in their first few years of operations, or older classical stadiums, typically at least five to six decades in age or older [61].…”

“…To begin with, focusing on the dependent variable of Attendance, plotting the data in a histogram reveals that the data are not normally distributed, and thus could produce biased results when estimating a regression [44]. To account for this, we follow the approach commonly utilized in economic research on sport demand by transforming Attendance by its natural log to estimate the regression results [56]. Because there are a large number of sellouts in the NFL, attendance numbers are constrained by the size of the stadium in which a team plays.…”

The impact of participation in pan-European competition on domestic performance in association football

“…Because the qualification rules ensure that participants are drawn from among the strongest teams in domestic leagues, positive effects would imply that pan-European competitions reduce domestic competitive balance. The uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (Rottenberg, 1956) posits that this will lead to lower attendances although the empirical evidence is not conclusive on this question (Buraimo & Simmons, 2015;Sung & Mills, 2018;Szymanski, 2003). The effects of pan-European 3 competition have particular contemporary relevance since UEFA has recently announced that a third competition, 'Europa League 2', will be introduced from 2021 (BBC Sport, 2018) which will mean that the effects of pan-European competition extend to more clubs and leagues.…”