Ticket demand depending on the number of local clubs.(RESEARCH NOTE)

The demand for sports tickets in general and the demand for football tickets, specifically in European top-leagues, has been subject of a couple of empirical studies within the last years e. g., in France, England, and Germany. These papers focused mainly on single matches and the significance of factors like uncertainty, performance of the clubs, or date and time of a competition. A theoretical background for the ticket demand is unknown so far.

As a first step to change this, we consider a standard Hotelling-model with two stages. While in stage one, an established club is representing the regional monopolist, offering the good major league football as a second club is breaking up this monopoly in stage two. Both clubs are located in the same city; the location of the stadium is fixed in the short run. Moreover, the possible spectators are assumed to be equally-distributed over the region, with their number being constant during the observation period with no personal preferences considered. The individuals are maximizing their utility on the basis of transportation costs to the stadium and the fact that major league matches offer a higher utility level than a minor league match. Because of these assumptions, we estimate a decreasing ticket demand for the established club from that season on when the incumbent is entering the market.

In a second step, the situation is analyzed for six German cities which hosted more than a single premier league club at the same time (Berlin, Bochum, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart). In contrast to our estimation, no empirical evidence could be given for the thesis of a decreasing ticket demand in the case of a broken regional monopoly (stage two). Only for the case of Munich a negative coefficient could be regarded, although this was not significant. In all other cases, we had to realize positive effects (which were not significant in most cases, too). On this basis, it can be concluded that the demand for tickets in professional football seems to be quite long-term oriented. In a case where a second club enters the same division, the number of possible visitors seems to increase. A growing market because of an increasing general interest in football would at least explain the positive coefficients which appeared in five of six cases. Following this approach, the use of a modified Hotelling-model cannot explain the demand for football tickets in Germany.

M. Breuer * B. Rommelt

School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Institute of Sport Science, Sport Economy,

Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, 07749 Jena, Germany

e-mail: markus.breuer@uni-jena.de

Published online: 25 January 2009

Print Get the Mag Weekly Updates