Emotional Cues and the Demand for Televised Sports: Evidence from the UEFA Champions League

Travis Richardson, Georgios Nalbantis and Tim Pawlowski

Journal of Sports Economics, 2023, vol. 24, issue 8, 993-1025

Abstract: This study provides first evidence on how belief dynamics are driving entertainment utility and consequently the demand for sports across markets by analyzing minute-by-minute audience data of UEFA Champions League (UCL) games televised in the UK and the Spanish market during a full (pre-COVID) cycle of broadcasting rights. Overall, we find that suspense and surprise are the main drivers of demand in both markets while shock only has marginal effects in the Spanish market. Interestingly, we find a combined impact of suspense and surprise in the UK market that is of similar magnitude as reported in a previous study for English Premier League matches in the UK. In the Spanish market, however, the combined impact is considerably larger.

Keywords: suspense; surprise; shock; emotional cue; TV demand; UEFA Champions League (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D12 L82 L83 Z20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15270025231187067 (text/html)

Related works:
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:sae:jospec:v:24:y:2023:i:8:p:993-1025

DOI: 10.1177/15270025231187067

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Sports Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().