Determinants of stadium attendance in Italian Serie A: New evidence based on fan expectations.

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the impact of the main determinants of match-day stadium attendance for seven seasons-2012-13 to 2018-19-of the Italian football Serie A. The main element of novelty is that the dataset is split into three sub-categories based on the pre-season fans' expectations to verify whether the impact of attendance determinants varies depending on teams' expected performance. Our results-based on Tobit model regressions-identify some significant differences across the three subsets. However, the difference that seems to be the most significant revealed a common preference of Italian fans towards higher quality opponents.