ABSTRACT

Identifying and understanding the relationship between a sporting competition’s characteristics and the demand for that product in the form of attendance is an important component in the design of league and cup competition formats. One such common policy-amenable element added to league structures is the addition of a post-season play-off system, whereby the allocation of end-of-season outcomes such as winning

the overall championship or promotion/relegation to different divisions is finally determined. Such play-off systems are common and featured in many diverse sports, from determining champions in North American sports such as Major League Baseball and American Football to partly determining promotion and relegation issues in open league formats such as the European soccer leagues. One motivation for the presence of play-offs is that they argued to influence regular season attendance by increasing the proportion of regular season games for which a team is still in contention for the end-of-season outcome. Though play-offs are a common feature of many professional sporting competitions, there is little consistency in the design and size of play-off structure both within and across different sports, indicating that the size and nature of the impact of play-off designs on attendance at regular season matches is largely unknown. Although there exists an extensive literature on the determinants of demand within support in general and on the impact of league design in particular, limitations in the statistical techniques and the lack of a model which relates play-off design to demand has not reduced this uncertainty (Cairns, 1990; Kuypers, 1997; Borland and Macdonald, 2003; Noll, 2003). This chapter therefore outlines a statistical approach that may be used to address

this important research gap, and is illustrated with an empirical investigation of the incremental impact of a promotional play-off system on the attendance at regular season league matches in the English professional soccer league immediately below the top-tier Premiership division. The process of conducting this research is conceptually simple and falls into three distinct steps:

1. Identification of the theoretical means by which play-off design may influence regular season games;

2. Estimation of the relevant parameters using empirical data; and finally

3. Prediction of attendances under other hypothetical play-off designs to identify the effects of different designs.