Big Games: The Importance Of Match Significance For Attendances In Four European Football Leagues

Matches in team sports are usually organised as leagues where there are end-of-season positive and negative prizes such as the championship, playoff qualification, and relegation. Most prior attempts to investigate how the significance of an individual match for these outcomes affects attendance or television ratings have failed to identify an effect. This paper argues that the explanation may be that most studies use ad hoc metrics which fail adequately to capture how important a match is. A recent development is to use metrics more rooted in sport analytics and research based on this approach has supported the notion that the size of the television audience is influenced by how much the match matters in the context of likely seasonal outcomes. Here, we extend the idea by applying it to modelling stadium attendance in four European football leagues. In each case, attendance is elevated as the match becomes more important from the perspective of the home club, whichever prize is considered. Matches which are important to the away club if it is a contender for the championship also raise expected attendance but this is not true for the negative prize of relegation. Implications for organisers of leagues are discussed.