Does Winning Matter? Purchase Decision Drivers of In-Game Attendance for the National Football League

Throughout this analysis we explore consumer demand for entertainment from live sporting events with a specific focus on NFL games. A widely established finding in previous studies of demand for live-game tickets for any major sporting event is that demand for tickets is inelastic, and ticket prices are set accordingly. We review literature stating this conclusion and find areas that this research could improve on, which takes the form of introducing our own contribution to the analysis field of variables that deal with the fans level of excitement and comfort during the live game experience. We perform several estimations and view descriptive statistics that lead up to our mixed-results conclusion that the factors that represent excitement are largely insignificant, and winning percentage or win total of a given NFL team is not a significant predictor of demand for live attendance. However, we have also discover several significant, comfort-based factors that previous research has left out, and prove that they are statistically significant areas of NFL demand prediction. These variables are with respect to the home Team’s climate and the stadium type where the team plays their home games. In general, our hypothesis returns mixed results with excitement factors not being a significant predictor of demand for NFL tickets, but showed that comfort-based factors were significant predictors of NFL attendance demand