14.02.2022

Competition and fan substitution between professional sports leagues

Tim Wallrafen, Georgios Nalbantis, and Tim Pawlowski (Institute of Sports Science) publish results of a study examining for the first time whether competition and fan substitution between professional team sports leagues exist.

A peculiarity in professional sports is the fact that leagues regularly hold monopoly power within their sports. However, whether and to what extent these leagues may compete with other leagues across sports is relatively unexplored yet. A study jointly conducted by Tim Wallrafen (PhD Alumni of the Department I), Georgios Nalbantis, and Tim Pawlowski (Institute of Sports Science) explores competition and fan substitution for the first time in Germany, where top-tier managers in handball, basketball, and ice hockey have recently claimed that their teams suffer from football’s dominant position. The attendance demand models confirm the existence of significant substitution effects in this setting, which suggests that leagues indeed do compete economically across sports for fan attendance.

The paper was recently published in the Review of Industrial Organization.

Wallrafen, T., Nalbantis, G., & Pawlowski, T. (2022). Competition and fan substitution between professional sports league. Review of Industrial Organization, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11151-022-09860-3