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

Abstract

Recent protests by athletes focused on raising awareness of social issues and injustices, such as the Black Lives Matter protests led by Colin Kaepernick of the National Football League's San Francisco 49ers, have generated a great deal of attention and debate within society. Notably, the protests conducted by these players before games in the 2016 and 2017 seasons became such a sensational topic, that extraordinary amounts of attention was paid to it by the media, consumers, and even politicians who often denounced the players as being unpatriotic. Against this backdrop, the current research examines whether fluctuations in attendance at National Football League games are associated with explicit attitudes towards race, implicit racial prejudice, and racial animus within a population. Specifically, using multiple measures of racial attitudes as part of an econometric model estimating attendance at games, the results suggest that having a higher level of implicit bias in a market leads to a decline in consumer interest in attending games. Additionally, using interaction effects, it is found that while protests generally reduced the negative effects of implicit bias on attendance, markets with lower levels of implicit bias actually had greater declines of attendance during the protests. From this, the current study advances the understanding of racial attitudes and racial animus, and its impact on consumer behavior at the regional level. That is, this research highlights that racial sentiments in a local market were able to predict changes in market behaviors, suggesting that race relations can have wide reaching impacts.

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“…From a research perspective, our study adds to the growing body of scholarship showing that county-level factors can influence health, health behaviors, and other community-level outcomes. For example, the relationship between pollution and poor health is offset in counties where people have a chance to be physically active [ 40 ], and racial biases at the county level are predictive of health disparities [ 41 , 42 ], the use of lethal force by police [ 43 ], Black school children’s punishments [ 44 ], and sports fans’ reactions to Black Lives Matter protests [ 45 ]. Our study contributes to this burgeoning line of inquiry by showing that health determinants are predictive of county residents’ mask wearing.…”

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“…The effect was particularly notable among whites with low levels of education. Watanabe and Cunningham (2020), meanwhile, link racial bias to NFL game attendance figures after the protests.…”