The Role of Patriotism in Explaining TV Audience of National Team Games - Evidence from Four International Tournaments

Egon Franck and Stephan Nuesch

No 65, Working Papers from University of Zurich, Institute for Strategy and Business Economics (ISU)

Abstract: Existing studies about the determinants of the so-called couch potato audience in sports concentrate on the quality of the sporting contest which involves both the absolute playing strength of the competing teams and the relative evenness of the competition. Regarding national team competitions, however, we expect that the TV audience should also be driven by patriotism. Analyzing the couch potato audience of all matches during the FIFA World Cup 2006 in Switzerland, we find strong evidence that the TV ratings are highly affected by the size of the groups of foreign residents affiliated to the teams playing on the field. Whereas absolute playing strength impacts on the TV ratings too, the effect of evenness of the competition is insignificant.

Keywords: TV audience; soccer; FIFA World Cup; patriotism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-mic and nep-spo
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/ISU_WPS/65_ISU_full.pdf First version, 2007 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Role of Patriotism in Explaining the TV Audience of National Team Games—Evidence From Four International Tournaments (2009)
Working Paper: The Role of Patriotism in Explaining TV Audience of National Team Games - Evidence from Four International Tournaments (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:wpaper:0065

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Zurich, Institute for Strategy and Business Economics (ISU) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by IBW IT ().