A tale of two audiences: spectators, television viewers and outcome uncertainty in Spanish football

This paper tests for the impact of match outcome uncertainty on two types of audience for Spanish football, fans at the stadium and television viewers. We find that fans inside the stadium prefer games that are less and not more likely to finish with a close score. This is contrary to much theoretical literature in sports economics which argues that fans prefer close contests and imposes this assumption in formal modelling. We also find that television viewers prefer close contests to more predictable contests. The different preferences of fans inside the stadium and television viewers need to be reconciled by the league when considering the effectiveness of policies to redistribute resources amongst teams in the league. We use our empirical model to consider how this tension might be resolved so as to maximise total audience and total league revenues.

Robust estimates of the impact of broadcasting on match attendance in football

The paper employs data from 2,884 matches, of which 158 were televised, in the second tier of English football (currently known as The Football League Championship). It builds a model of the determinants of attendance that is designed to yield estimates of the proportionate changes in the size of crowds resulting from games being shown on either free-to-air or subscription based channels. The model has two innovatory features. First, it controls for the market size of home and away teams very precisely by including local population measures constructed from the application of GIS software and information on competition from other clubs. Second, it employs the Hausman-Taylor random effects estimator in order to take explicit account of the endogeneity of the television coverage variable and of other variables typically included in earlier studies based on ordinary least squares or fixed effects models of attendance. The Hausman-Taylor estimates of the impact of broadcasting are greater than those reported in such studies. In the case of free-to-air television, the negative impact is estimated as over 20 percent but for subscription television, which carried most of the transmissions, the negative effect was only of the order of 5 percent

Outcome uncertainty and the couch potato audience

Previous studies of attendance demand for professional team sports have failed to yield clear- cut findings on the importance of outcome uncertainty to consumers. But potentially fewer problems should arise in examining the link between outcome uncertainty and demand in the television market for team sports, which in the case of English Premier League football is in fact a more important component in total club revenue. This study models both the choice of which games to show and the size of audience attracted by each game, exploiting data on audience sizes for games between 1993 and 2002. We propose a new measure of match outcome uncertainty and, from our results, both the broadcaster and the audience appear interested in competitive balance.

Market size and attendance in English Premier League football

This paper models the impacts of market size and team competition for fan base on matchday attendance in the English Premier League over the period 1997-2004 using a large panel data set. We construct a comprehensive set of control variables and use tobit estimation to overcome the problems caused by sell-out crowds. We also account for unobserved influences on attendance by means of random effects attached to home teams. Our treatment of market size, with its use of Geographical Information System techniques, is more sophisticated than in previous attendance demand studies.

Do Salaries Improve Worker Performance?

We establish the effects of salaries on worker performance by exploiting a natural experiment in which some workers in a particular occupation (football referees) switch from short-term contracts to salaried contracts. Worker performance improves among those who move onto salaried contracts relative to those who do not. The finding is robust to the introduction of worker fixed effects indicating that it is not driven by better workers being awarded salary contracts. Nor is it sensitive to workers sorting into or out of the profession. Improved performance could arise from the additional effort workers exert due to career concerns, the higher income associated with career contracts (an efficiency wage effect) or improvements in worker quality arising from off-the-job training which accompanies the salaried contracts.

Do Salaries Improve Worker Performance?

We establish the effects of salaries on worker performance by exploiting a natural experiment in which some workers in a particular occupation (football referees) switch from short-term contracts to salaried contracts. Worker performance improves among those who move onto salaried contracts relative to those who do not. The finding is robust to the introduction of worker fixed effects indicating that it is not driven by better workers being awarded salary contracts. Nor is it sensitive to workers sorting into or out of the profession. Improved performance could arise from the additional effort workers exert due to career concerns, the higher income associated with career contracts (an efficiency wage effect) or improvements in worker quality arising from off-the-job training which accompanies the salaried contracts.incentives, salaries, productivity, sports

Freedom of entry, market size and competitive outcome: evidence from English soccer

The paper tests, in the context of an open sports league, whether greater success is achieved by clubs in markets with larger populations. The relationship is strong but, to a limited extent, mitigated by more clubs establishing in large markets.

The Twelfth Man? Refereeing Bias in English and German Soccer

This paper investigates potential bias in awards of player disciplinary sanctions, in the form of cautions (yellow cards) and dismissals (red cards) by referees in the English Premier League and the Bundesliga. Previous studies of behaviour of soccer referees have not adequately incorporated within-game information. Descriptive statistics from our samples clearly show that home teams receive fewer yellow and red cards than away teams. But biases may be wrongly identified where the modeller has failed to include within-game events such as goals scored and recent cards issued. What appears as referee favouritism may actually be excessive and illegal aggressive behaviour by players in teams that are behind in score. We deal with these issues using a minute-by-minute bivariate probit analysis of yellow and red cards issued in games over six seasons in the two leagues. The significance of a variable to denote score difference at the time of sanction suggests that excessive effort, induced by a losing position, is an important influence on award of yellow and red cards. Controlling for a number of pre-game and within-game variables, we find evidence of home team favouritism in Germany as home teams with running tracks in their stadia attract more yellow and red cards than teams playing in stadia with separation of fans from pitch. This is indicative of referee response to social pressure. Separating the competing teams in matches by favourite and underdog status, as perceived by the betting market, yields further evidence, this time for both leagues, that the source of home teams receiving fewer cards is not just that they are disproportionately often the favoured team. Rather, there appears to be pure referee bias in relative treatments of home and away teams.Soccer, football, referee, sports

Systematic Positive Expected Returns in the UK Fixed Odds Betting Market: An Analysis of the Fink Tank Predictions

We report striking evidence of semi-strong inefficiency in the UK fixed-odds football betting market using a reputable newspaper tipster which offers probabilities of match outcomes rather than simple result indicators. Betting on the Fink Tank probabilities of home wins across 10 bookmakers, when there are positive expected returns, would have generated positive returns in each of the seasons from 2006–07 to 2011–12 for a variety of different betting strategies. These returns could have been enhanced by employing the best odds from a greater number of bookmakers. However, the fact that pure arbitrage bets have existed for years and appear to last for several hours or days suggest they are in practice not exploitable to a magnitude that poses any threat to bookmakers

An analysis of consumer response to corruption:Italy's Calciopoli scandal

The literature on economics of corruption is lacking in evidence on consumer responses to identifiable scandals. The Calciopoli episode affecting Italian football in the 2005/06 season serves as an opportunity for an empirical investigation into consumer (fan) behaviour following punishments imposed by the Italian league on clubs whose officials were found guilty of corrupt practices. Using a difference-in-difference estimation method, where the convicted teams are the treatment group, we find that home attendances for treated teams fell by around 16%, relative to control group teams defined as those clubs not subject to league-imposed punishment. We show further that the fall in attendances identified with Calciopoli punishment resulted in non-trivial gate revenue reductions. Our results suggest that a sizeable number of fans of the punished clubs were subsequently deterred from supporting their teams inside the stadium. We explore alternative explanations of this adverse fan response