Football Spectator No-Show Behavior in Switzerland: Empirical Evidence From Season Ticket Holder Behavior

Abstract

For football executives, understanding the determinants of spectator no-show behavior better is of utmost importance. Recent research efforts, however, have primarily focused on exploring the potential effects of determinants that the club management can hardly influence (e.g., potential scheduling effects, the visiting team's quality, and the weather). In contrast, our understanding of factors relating to both accommodation (e.g., the ticket price), socio-demographics (e.g., age), and also emerging no-show habits, in predicting no-show behavior is still limited. Here, departing from more traditional survey-approaches, we address this shortcoming by exploring disaggregated behavioral season ticket holder data provided by an established Swiss Super League club. Analyzing a rich data set containing roughly 2.09 million attendance decisions made by ticket holders in Switzerland between 2013 and 2016, we observe that both a season ticket holder's accommodation and his (or her) socio-demographic information can help predict subsequent no-show behavior. In particular, we notice an important role of a season ticket holders' age, his (or her) domicile, and emerging no-show habits, as well as the season ticket price. Although our results suggest that the management of clubs with a strong demand for tickets might be well-advised to begin experimenting with strategies to exploit emerging no-show habits among their season ticket holders, most executives, i.e., those operating at clubs that sell-out their stadium only occasionally, might want to prioritize efforts to increase the inherent ticket value (e.g., by reducing the ticket supply).

Stadium Attendance Demand Research: A Scoping Review

“…While this practice is not only common in the literature, and primarily driven by limited data availability, but also historically grown, we believe that future research might profit from excluding season ticket holder information and, perhaps even the number of free tickets, from the dependent variable while discussing the potential pitfalls in more detail if the former is not possible. Alternatively, as technological progress allows for generating better information, exploring behavioral stadium attendance demand, that is, the actual matchday turnout, might be a profitable approach (e.g., Schreyer et al, 2016; Schreyer & Torgler, 2021).…”

Stadium attendance demand in the men’s UEFA Champions League: Do fans value sporting contest or match quality?

“…Our dependent variable is the overall number of spectators for each match-obtained from individual match data on skysports.com, whereas X ijt is a vector of independent variables, Z a vector of dummy variables, S a vector of dummies capturing season fixed effects, T a vector of dummies capturing team fixed effects, α, β, and γ the associated coefficients, and e ijt the disturbance term. The use of the overall number of spectators as dependent variable implies some limitations, as it does not account for spectator no-show behaviour [73][74][75], that could be particularly relevant during the group stages, and the number of free tickets, and does not differentiate among season and match-day tickets. Nonetheless, it is still the dependant variable most commonly employed in studies on stadium demand [4].…”