Browsing by Author "Aaltonen, Samuli"

The market size of the European professional football market grew from 13,6 billion to 25,5 billion euros during the time-period 2006 – 2017. While the overall market size is constantly growing, the market sizes of some football clubs seem to grow faster than the other ones. Several studies on the field of sports economics suggest that the bigger clubs tend to get bigger and the smaller stay small. One potential explanation for this is so-called glory hunter effect that means a phenomenon where people suddenly form a strong connection to a certain club when the club is enjoying a spell of increasing success. In terms of consumer theory, glory hunting would mean that a football game as a good is more attractive to the customers when their favorite team is doing good in the competition, which would mean higher stadium attendances when a team is higher in the league standings and thus increase the market size for the company that in this case is a football club. In this thesis the glory hunter effect will be studied by a question: How does the competitive success affect the stadium attendance levels in the English Football League Championship during the seasons 2013/2014 – 2017/2018. Competitive success in this thesis is measured by the league standings that the teams had before a game took place. The research question is studied using three different models that use OLS and Prais Winsten methods and are based on both the earlier literature on the field and the dataset used in this thesis. The dataset consists of match by match data from the five seasons that are studied and it contains game-related, club-related and socio-economic variables. The variables that are found to have an effect of some signifficance on the stadium attendance in the earlier literature are included in the regressions with some modifications since the earlier literature on this field mainly focuses on the top-5 national leagues in Europe and there are few earlier studies that consider the case of lower league football. Results obtained with the three models used in this thesis strongly indicate that there is a significant relationship between competitive success and the attendance levels. Depending on the model, the results suggest that one position higher league standing of a home team means a bit over or under a one percent more attendance to the stadium. The effect appears to be highest in the model that does not use a habit variable and has the lowest explanation level from the three models. A high effect that the average attendance level of a team, which is used as a habit variable in the two other models, has on the explained variable that is the actual attendance level at a game suggests that eventhough the competitive success has a significant effect on the stadium attendance, most of the people that go to English Football League Championship games are not that sensitive for short term changes in their teams´ performance in the league. These two findings give support for a theory presented by Sass (2016) which proposes that a longer period of great competitive success has a significant positive effect on the market size of a football club.