Competitive Balance and TV Audience: An Empirical Analysis on the Italian Serie A

The paper investigates the behaviour of “couch potato” audience of the Italian Football League - Serie A - during the season 2008/09. Using data on the 380 matches we considered a collection of variables suitable of influencing the share of TV audience of satellite television. According to standard prescriptions of sports economics literature and assessing peculiarities of Italian contest, we estimated the “Football on TV’s” demand by an OLS regression model. Rating the dependent variable of TV audience by the share registered in each match we introduced a set of independent variables in order to approximate the quality of the match, the programme schedule placement, the following of the teams involved and their rank. As in others theoretical and empirical investigations focused on Spanish and English championships, our attention concentrates particularly on the relationship between the closeness of the game and the television audience. In the regression model uncertainty of outcome has been measured extracting information from Italian fixed-odds betting market. We found that all the theoretical expected relationships are confirmed by the econometric analysis. In spite of the statistical significance of the outcome uncertainty on share, the estimation points out that more then 90% of variability of TV audience is explained net of uncertainty factors and that the impact of a closest contest on dependent variable is marginal. The overestimation of the role of matches uncertainty on TV audience could support the opinion of top team’s management opposing the return to the collective bargaining of TV rights starting from next season 2010/11 fixed by the law 9/2008 of Italian Parliament. In football contest the competitive balance should then be considered a “meritorius good”, far from market assessment. [...]