Substitution in Sports: The Case of Lower Division Football Attendance

Wallrafen T, Pawlowski T, Deutscher C. Substitution in Sports: The Case of Lower Division Football Attendance. Journal of Sports Economics. 2019;20(3):319-343.Commercialization processes in European football are facilitated by reducing concurrent games within the leagues and reallocating kickoff times to prime time slots abroad. Consequently, the number of top division games that temporally overlap with lower division games has increased significantly during recent years. By using attendance data of around 6,000 games in Germany's fourth division, this article is the first to empirically test whether such overlaps have any adverse demand effects for lower division games. Fixed effects panel regressions reveal that overlapping games indeed reduce the demand for lower division games, suggesting some negative spillovers of commercialization processes in football