The impact of sporting success on student enrollment

In recent years, universities increasingly had to compete for talented students. Besides running other marketing activities, universities began to cooperate with local professional soccer clubs. However, there is missing evidence on the positive effects of such collaborations. One possible benefit of having a local professional soccer team in a city could be the attraction of new students. Although soccer is an important leisure activity, research insights into the relationship between professional soccer and the demand for studies are rare. In this context, we consider promotions and relegations of professional soccer clubs and their impact on student enrollment growth, since these events are exogenous and time variant leading to an exogenous change of local public goods, private goods and media attention. Focusing on public German universities, dynamic panel regressions show that promotions and relegations of the best local soccer club to the next higher or lower division significantly influence the number of student enrollments in the upcoming semester. This effect is mainly driven by exceptional promotions and relegations. Moreover, student growth is affected by other external shocks on the education system such as double graduation or the status of being an “elite university”. Surprisingly, research funds and tuition fees were found to have no effect. The results provide considerable insights for decision makers, signifying that the sporting performance of professional local soccer clubs might affect enrolment decisions and could be used as an indicator for predicting the expected number of upcoming student applications or serve as an additional instrument in marketing campaigns and recruiting activities of a university.