Distance matters in away games: Evidence from the German Football League

Harald Oberhofer, Tassilo Philippovich (tassilo.philippovich@gmail.com) and Hannes Winner

No 2009-1, Working Papers in Economics from University of Salzburg

Abstract: This paper assesses the role of distance in professional team sports, taking the example of football (soccer). We argue that a team’s performance in terms of scored and conceded goals decreases with the distance to the foreign playing venue. To test this hypothesis empirically, we investigate 6,389 away games from the German Football Premier League (’Erste Deutsche Bundesliga’) between the playing seasons 1986-87 and 2006-07. We find that distance increases a guest team’s propensity to concede goals and exhibits a negative but insignificant impact on the ability to score goals. The parameter estimates of the squared distance terms indicate that the effects of distance on team performance are non-monotonic. Further, focusing on the outcome of the game (i.e., win, draw or defeat) as a measure of the overall success of a football team we observe significantly negative effects of distance.

Keywords: Professional team performance; distance; event count data; poisson regression model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C29 L25 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2009-10-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.uni-salzburg.at/fileadmin/oracle_file_imports/1383245.PDF Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.uni-salzburg.at/fileadmin/oracle_file_imports/1383245.PDF [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.uni-salzburg.at/fileadmin/oracle_file_imports/1383245.PDF [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.plus.ac.at/404)

Related works:
Journal Article: Distance matters in away games: Evidence from the German football league (2010)
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:ris:sbgwpe:2009_001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Salzburg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jörg Paetzold (joerg.paetzold@sbg.ac.at).