Football on TV: an empirical analysis on the Italian couch potato attitudes

This paper investigates the relationship between Football and TV audience looking for empirical evidences from Italian Serie A. The analysis traces previous econometric study, based on season 2008/09, focusing on season 2009/10. Data on 380 matches played in the Italian top professional football league are collected in order to select variables suitable of influencing the share of TV audience on satellite television. We try to estimate the «Football on TV» demand by an OLS regression model introducing a set of independent variables about the match quality, the TV programming placement, the market size of teams and their rank. In addition, our attention concentrates on the relationship between the closeness of the game and the television audience, where uncertainty of outcome is modelled using information from the betting market. It emerges that many of the theoretical expected relationships are confirmed by the econometric analysis, even though some peculiarities emerge with respect to the uncertainty of outcome issue. In particular, more close contexts are important in determining the interest of sporting events, also from the Italian TV audience perspective, but they are not crucial. When the uncertainty of outcome is considered together with teams probabilities of win the relationship is negative, suggesting that TV audience is committed just like stadium fans, and mainly interested in specific team performances. This result may be also justified invoking the «David versus Goliath» hypothesis for which the couch potato longs for an upset of the top ranked teams. But the role of Inter, Juventus and Milan confirms decisive in determining the size of TV audience.[...]