Market size and attendance in English Premier League football

Abstract

This paper models the impacts of market size and team competition for fan base on matchday attendance in the English Premier League over the period 1997-2004 using a large panel dataset. The authors construct a comprehensive set of control variables and use Tobit estimation to overcome the problems caused by sell-out crowds. The authors also account for unobserved influences on attendance by means of random effects attached to home teams. The authors' treatment of market size, with its use of geographical information system (GIS) techniques, is more sophisticated than in previous attendance demand studies.