Competitive Balance e Audience Televisiva: Una Analisi Empirica dalla Serie A Italaina

This paper investigates the behaviour of the “couch potato” audience in regards to the ItalianFootball League - Serie A - during the 2008/09 season. Using data from 380 matches, weconsidered a collection of variables suitable to influence the share of TV audience of satellitetelevision. According to the standard prescriptions of sports economics literature andassessing peculiarities of Italian context, we estimated the “Football on TV’s” demand by anOLS regression model. Rating the dependent variable of TV audience by the share registeredin each match, we introduced a set of independent variables in order to approximate matchquality, the programme schedule placement, the follow-up of the involved teams and theirrank. As other theoretical and empirical investigations have focused on Spanish and Englishchampionships, our attention concentrates particularly on the relationship between thecloseness of the game and the television audience. In the regression model, uncertainty ofoutcome has been measured extracting information from the Italian fixed odds betting market.We found that all the theoretical expected relationships have been confirmed by theeconometric analysis. In spite of the statistical significance of the outcome uncertainty onshare, the estimation points out that more then 90% of variability concerning TV audience hasbeen explained net of uncertainty factors and that the impact of a closest context on dependentvariable is marginal. The overestimation of the role of match uncertainty on TV audiencecould support the opinion of top team’s management opposing the return to the collectivebargaining of TV rights starting from next season, 2010/11, fixed by the law 9/2008 of ItalianParliament. In football context the competitive balance should then be considered a“meritorius good”, far from market assessment.[...]