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.