How outcome uncertainty, loss aversion and team quality affect stadium attendance in Dutch professional football

Abstract

We investigate stadium attendance in the highest level of Dutch professional football for the seasons 2000/01-2015/16 focusing on outcome uncertainty, loss aversion and team quality. We find that for individual football matches, attendance is related to reference-dependent preferences with loss aversion dominating the preference for uncertain outcomes. Furthermore, team quality is an important determinant of stadium attendance. Towards the end of the season, outcome uncertainty regarding the final ranking becomes important. For this seasonal uncertainty, we find a positive and stable, but rather small impact of the introduction of a unique and large end-ofseason play-off scheme for the qualification for European football.

Stadium Attendance Demand Research: A Scoping Review

“…28 More precisely, we count that about 60% of all authors/author teams addressed this important methodological issue, some even although it is, according to their own statement, not an urgent issue in their specific environment (e.g., Forrest & Simmons, 2006;Reilly, 2015;Watanabe, 2015); for example, because frequent sellouts are less likely in developing markets and lower tiers. Those authors that, however, observed a fair share of right-censored observations typically employ a tobit model (e.g., Besters et al, 2019;Bond & Addesa, 2020;Cox, 2018), either primarily or as an additional robustness check, although we also observe an increasing use of censored regression (e.g., Hong et al, 2013;Meehan et al, 2007;Ormiston, 2014), or the exclusion of potentially truncated cases (e.g., Denaux et al, 2011), among others. In fact, only a few authors discussed capacity constraints as a limitation without taking any methodological action against it.…”

“…27 Perhaps one potential reason for this is that most authors still wrongly consider season ticket holders to be behavioral loyal (e.g., . Somewhat similarly, only a few authors either have excluded (e.g., Chmait et al, 2020) or added information on free tickets (e.g., Anthony et al, 2014), and even fewer considered this a limitation of their study (e.g., Besters et al, 2019).…”

“…That is, we observe that the titles of roughly every fourth study include a reference to the concept of competitive balance and the resulting match outcome uncertainty. Interestingly enough, these references are surprisingly diverse, and include, for example, championship uncertainty (e.g., Pawlowski & Nalbantis, 2015), competitive intensity (e.g., Bond & Addesa, 2020), loss aversion (e.g., Besters et al, 2019), outcome uncertainty (e.g., Martins & Cró, 2018), uncertainty (e.g., Serrano et al, 2015), uncertainty of outcome (e.g., Hogan et al, 2017), and uncertainty of results (e.g., Cox, 2018). 25 Further, as the debate on the validity of Rottenberg's (1956) so-called uncertainty of outcome hypothesis has not yet been laid to a final rest, we note a relatively consistent output of such studies in the last decade; that is, in 2010 (3), 2011 (1), 2012 (4), 2013 (4), 2014 (2), 2015 (4), 2016 (2), 2017 (1), 2018 (4), 2019 (2), and 2020 (3).…”

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

“…. 3.1.5 How outcome uncertainty, loss aversion, and team quality affect stadium attendance in Dutch professional football (Besters et al, 2019). 3.1.6 Uncertainty of outcome or strengths of teams: an economic analysis of attendance demand for international cricket (Sacheti et al, 2014).…”

Common International Trends in Football Stadium Attendance

“…Recent empirical studies on stadium attendance are usually based on match-level data from a limited number of seasons in a single country investigating the relationship with among others the uncertainty of outcome. Besters et al [4] for example analyze 18 seasons of teams from the top football league in the Netherlands finding that the attendance of individual matches in Dutch professional football is related to loss aversion more than to preference for uncertain outcomes. Furthermore, team quality is important while towards the end of the season, outcome uncertainty with respect to the final ranking becomes important.…”