Disaggregated Attendance Demand: Comparing Daily Ticket Purchasers and Season Ticket Holders in K-League 1

Abstract

This study investigates differences in the preferences of daily ticket purchasers and season ticket holders, focusing on outcome uncertainty. Using unique game-level attendance data of both daily ticket purchasers and season ticket holders for every team in the Korean top-tier professional soccer league, we find heterogeneity in demand between daily ticket purchasers and season ticket holders with respect to outcome uncertainty, preference for home team success, team performance, geographical distance between competing teams, and weekend games. Our results suggest that season ticket holders do not care as much about their team's performance and outcome uncertainty as daily ticket purchasers do.

Missed a live match? Determinants of League of Legends Champions Korea highlights viewership

“…The results support the UOH for highlight viewers, which was consistent with those of previous studies on TV viewership for traditional sports (Paul and Weinbach, 2007;Tainsky, 2010;Cox, 2018). These results are consistent with those of a study on Korean soccer league live attendees (Sung and Pyun, 2023).…”

“…Other match-related characteristics such as day of the week (Buraimo and Simmons, 2008 ), game time (Krumer, 2020 ), weather (Ge et al, 2020 ), and geographical distance between competing teams (Humphreys and Miceli, 2020 ; Sung and Pyun, 2023 ), are commonly used as determinants of sports demand. Home team market size and conditions, such as population, average income, stadium quality, and ticket prices, are the other identified determinants of attendance demand (Pyun et al, 2020 ).…”

They are not all the same: Determinants of attendance across different sectors in a stadium

“…Nonetheless, we show support for the statement from previous literature reviews about the need for more demand research on overlooked football leagues [ 1 , 36 ]. We can luckily find few attempts to model attendance demand on South American [ 22 – 25 , 37 ], African [ 38 , 39 ] or Asian [ 21 , 40 – 42 ] football competitions, but more can be done and the literature would certainly benefit from the potential findings.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, there are only few works on football that previously addressed similar issue. A manuscript investigating Preston North End matches over two seasons (1955/56 and 1991/92) [ 19 ], a discussion paper which inspects the differences in the determinants of home and away fans using extensive data in England–mostly from lower divisions [ 12 ], a study that focused on the flow of away fans for football matches in Spain [ 20 ], and a recent paper which inspects the differences in preferences among daily ticket purchasers and season ticket holders [ 21 ].…”