Abstract
In this study, we comprehensively analyzed the attendance determinants of the Korean professional football league (K-League) using panel data from 15 individual teams during the 1987–2011 seasons. The K-League has some unique characteristics that other leagues, particularly those in North America and Europe, do not possess. The governance structure is heterogeneous, including both multiple-supporter-owned and major-corporation-owned teams. Additionally, the regulation authority shifted over the time period studied from broadly regional to city based. The results of this study suggested that the home-and-away match system with a host city attracted greater attendance than the system with multiple host cities, and the supporter-owned teams attracted more fans than did large-company-owned clubs when other attendance determinants were held constant. Outcome uncertainty for attendance determination was significant, not only statistically but also economically.
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- 1.
The first professional football league in East Asia was the Hong Kong Professional Football League, founded in 1908. The Japan Professional Football League and the China Professional Football League were founded in 1992 and 1994, respectively.
- 2.
Playoff uncertainty represents the closeness of the race in a regular season for the playoffs or for the championship.
- 3.
The average winning percentages of teams with parent companies and supporter-owned teams were 0.529 and 0.404 during 2002–2011, respectively.
- 4.
The 2012 regular season of the KBO was from 7 April to 6 October, and that of the K-league was from 3 March to 1 December.
- 5.
The NBA, the National Football League (NFL), and the National Hockey League (NHL) also have overlapping regular seasons. However, the substitution effects among them cannot be examined because most games are sold out in those leagues. But see Winfree and Fort (2008) on measuring one type of substitution during prolonged labor-management disagreements.
- 6.
Lee (2006) analyzed the rapid decline in attendance of the KBO that occurred in the late 1990s and found that the substitution effect of MLB was a major cause.
- 7.
A business team is a team whose workers are associated with a particular parent company or business.
- 8.
Prior to the 1996 season, a club’s name included that of the parent company; for example, the Hyundai Tigers.
- 9.
The decline in attendance was particularly great in the 2011 season. The decline was likely influenced by a match-fixing scandal in 2011 in which more than 40 football players were banned for life from any football-related activity in South Korea.
- 10.
Six players moved to the European football leagues within one year after the 2002 World Cup: Chong-Gug Song (Feyenoord Rotterdam), Nam-Il Kim (SBV Excelsior), Ji-Sung Park (PSV Eindhoven), Young-Pyo Lee (PSV Eindhoven), Chun-Soo Lee (Real Sociedad), and Eul-Yong Lee (Trabzonspor).
- 11.
For a team that held four home games in City A and six home games in City B, the average population would be \(POP\,=\,0.4\cdot PO{{P}_{A}}\,+\,0.6\cdot PO{{P}_{B}}\), where POPA is the population of City A, and POPB is the population of City B.
- 12.
Ticket prices are also an important determinant of attendance. However, we could not include ticket prices as an explanatory variable because complete price data are not available. Therefore, to ensure that omission of ticket prices did not result in biased estimates of other regressors, we assumed implicitly that ticket prices in the K-League were not correlated with regressors.
- 13.
Because the point system changed frequently, we standardized the point system as follows: 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, and no points for a loss.
- 14.
In the official statistics of the K-League, the final club is associated with the club history and records of all predecessors.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A5A2A01013738).
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Jang, H., Lee, Y. (2015). Outcome Uncertainty, Governance Structure, and Attendance: A Study of the Korean Professional Football League. In: Lee, Y., Fort, R. (eds) The Sports Business in The Pacific Rim. Sports Economics, Management and Policy, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10037-1_4
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