FiT Publishing

This study investigates soccer video games as a platform to promote soccer engagement (i.e., involvement, behavioral intentions) among those who do not physically play soccer regularly. Perceived soccer literacy is proposed as a construct explaining the promotional effect, consisting of the four sub-themes of affective attitude, perceived functional knowledge, perceived critical knowledge, and perceived competence. A study was conducted based on an online survey and with US and Canadian adults who do not physically play soccer on a regular basis. With structural equation modeling, (1) the...Read more

This study investigates soccer video games as a platform to promote soccer engagement (i.e., involvement, behavioral intentions) among those who do not physically play soccer regularly. Perceived soccer literacy is proposed as a construct explaining the promotional effect, consisting of the four sub-themes of affective attitude, perceived functional knowledge, perceived critical knowledge, and perceived competence. A study was conducted based on an online survey and with US and Canadian adults who do not physically play soccer on a regular basis. With structural equation modeling, (1) the...Read more

Existing research on spectator demand tends to focus primarily on elite club sport. This paper aims to expand on the literature by applying regression models to a large and unique set of survey data collected from Danish men’s national soccer team matches held from 2013 to 2017. The output from our models suggests that the number of matches attended is positively related to future demand, as are the results of the matches. Our results have implications for managers of national sports federations because they provide information on how spectators’ interest in and intention to attend matches...Read more

This paper investigates the relationship between European football league competitive balance and the performance of that league’s participants in UEFA competitions. The evidence suggests that competitive balance measured using performance points fits the performance coefficients of countries participating in the Champions League and Europa League and that a reciprocal model fits the data best. The evidence suggests that marginal improvements in competitive balance can lead to increase of one-third a win for a league’s participants in the Champions League. The increased rewards for UEFA...Read more

This study is the first to estimate the effects of the sending-off of a player on the full-time results in international club soccer. To this end, we analyze data of more than 2,000 recent matches in the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League. We find that, when home teams receive a red card, it harms their goal scoring and victory probabilities. By contrast, a red card for away teams can have a positive, negative, or neutral effect for them, depending on the timing of the player dismissal.

JEL Classification: L83, J44, Z00

DOI: ...Read more

There is a common perception that the German football system is financially more stable than other European football league systems. However, we show that the German football pyramid is no more immune to the problem of insolvency than other European football league pyramids. We provide evidence to show that insolvency occurs in German football at a frequency comparable to the English and French leagues. We also show that the pattern of insolvency is consistent with the experience of English and French football identified in Szymanski (2017) and Scelles et al. (2018). Using season-level...Read more

This paper tests for salary discrimination based on player ethnicities in Major League Soccer (MLS) with a market model. Particular focus is paid to Club Deportivo Chivas USA, which was operated by owners of a Mexican team that explicitly excludes non-Mexicans from their roster, Club Deportivo Guadalajara. Evidence of wage discrimination in MLS is found and the model is used to estimate how much of Chivas USA’s poor performance was due to discrimination.

doi.org/10.32731/IJSF.141.022019.02Read more

Europe’s professional football clubs engage in intraseasonal races to win the league, qualify for Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) competitions, and avoid relegation. In these competitions, playing talent is a scarce good as players invest effort in the form of fitness and the risk of injuries. Thus, managers face incentives to adjust effort levels by means of changing the value of starting squads. This paper analyzes whether managers save efforts in the absence of financial incentives or ahead of more important games. The theoretical model extends previous papers from the...Read more

The uncertainty of outcome hypothesis is revisited in this paper in the context of a more general demand analysis of free-to-air soccer games broadcast in Spain. Apart from analyzing some expected determinants of television viewers’ aggregate behavior, such as the quality of the game and the type of match broadcast, and other seasonal effects, an alternative approach based on bettor predictions of the possible outcome of a particular match is used to test this hypothesis. The empirical findings show that expected uncertainty of outcome may either have no effect on (soccer) TV audiences or...Read more

In this article, we propose a new estimation strategy that draws on the variation in the performance between the male and the female national soccer team within a country to identify the effect of gender equality on women’s soccer success. For this, country year fixed effects are used to control for both time-constant and time-variant country specific factors. Our results reveal that within-country differences in our proxies for gender equality explain the international soccer performance of female teams, but have no notable explanatory power for the success of male teams. This suggests...Read more