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Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p6409"

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  • Hölttä, Jan Alexander (2020)
    Professional sports have been of interest to economists in growing proportions since the 1950s, due to the rather straightforward nature of the measurement of performance and the easy access to data. In Finland, football has only lately been making its way towards the limelight of large audiences. To react to this surge of interest, the national football authorities opted for a large revamp of the league system between the 2018 and the 2019 seasons. The reform was welcomed by both partakers and the public, and the Finnish football boom continued with the help of positive results achieved by the national team. This thesis seeks to determine the factors that form the total demand of football in the Finnish Veikkausliiga with a special emphasis on the possible relationship with social media activity. The research question of this thesis is the following: what factors are significant in determining the demand of football, and does social media play a role in it? The research question is approached from the point of view of previous literature and an empirical part. Data about the matches of the 2019 season and the factors that potentially had relationships with their demand has been gathered from various sources, following closely procedures used in the relevant literature. The data is modeled with three OLS regressions involving different choices of variables. The regression results support earlier findings in the field, implying statistically significant relationships between the home team’s lagged attendance from the previous season, the home team’s position in the league table, the uncertainty of the result, bad weather, and the attendances in the 2019 season. Additionally, the self-constructed variable – based on the existing literature – depicting social media activity is found to have a statistically significant relationship with attendance demand, although no conclusions can be drawn on causality.