title: Public policy decisions, match attendance and on-pitch performance in English football
Creators: name: Yeo, Matthew
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2024

description: This thesis consists of three Chapters on economic related outcomes related to English Association Football. We demonstrate that these outcomes are a result of policy decisions or strategic decision making by government, football clubs or sporting bodies and how they add to existing understanding within sports economics.

In Chapter one, we examine mass attendance events, which are a mainstay of economic and social activity. Whilst the benefits from such interactions are large, they may also facilitate the spread of diseases from person to person. We provide evidence on how mass outdoor gatherings contributed to the spread of Covid-19. We do this by considering how attendance at football matches in England in February and March 2020 contributed to Covid-19 cases and deaths in local areas in April 2020. We contribute to the literature on the Covid-19 pandemic and mass attendance events, policy areas that continue to be studied so that preparation can be made for future similar style events.

 

Our results suggest that an additional match taking place in an area in March increased Covid deaths by 2 or 3 per 100,000 people in that area. Overall, our analysis suggests that there should be caution in allowing fans to attend matches either during or immediately after a pandemic, despite the economic impact playing football behind closed doors has on clubs.

 

The second and third Chapters look at the effect of one specific change as an outcome influencer, either introducing a 3G pitch instead of a grass pitch, or where fans have taken over the ownership of a club instead of a single owner or company, this is then tested to see how this affects performance either financially or on the pitch. These two Chapters contribute to the growing football related sports economics literature, by exploring a unique dataset covering the entire grassroots non-league football structure in England, a part of football economics literature that has largely been untouched.


The policy interest in this section lies in whether and how far, sporting authorities should promote either these different types of football pitches or alternative models of ownership of clubs. There is wider football community interest in relation to the introduction of 3G pitches as they can be re-used during poor weather conditions, don't have to be relayed but also are an expensive initial outlay, so the benefits are worth investigating. These benefits are theorised to be either that the community re­ use and availability during inclement weather is an attendance driver or whether the pitch itself gives a competitive advantage to the club using the pitch regularly, when compared to clubs that do not have them. Within the existing literature, Chapter Two uses competitive balance and uncertainty of outcome hypotheses (Humphreys and Zhou, 2015) as a theoretical background to test whether a football club installing a 3G pitch has an effect, if any, on attendance at matches or on-pitch performance by clubs. We find that 3G pitches appear to only affect attendance outcomes at the lowest competitive levels (Step 7 and below) and they do not appear to have significant on­ pitch performance advantages (there could be some specific within Step-level effects at league level but these require future investigation).

Football clubs are also social enterprises with significant stakeholders, namely fans and supporters, who exert influence on outcomes often without having any formal decision­ making authority. In Chapter Three, we test this question of fan involvement in football by looking at the effect of fan-ownership of clubs on attendance and performance. The positive effects of fan ownership are more evident in this Chapter, than the effects of a 3G pitch in Chapter Two. Fan-owned clubs when compared to clubs not owned by fans, have an average attendance increase in Steps 2, 3 and 5 of the non-league structure. Home club performance also improves with positive effects for fan-ownership, making home wins more likely at Steps at 2-7. We also find an increase in the number of goals scored per fan-owned club but only at Step 7. This may be reassuring to fan-owned clubs that they are not at a disadvantage in the lower levels of non-league football, and potentially influence football administrators to


encourage this model, especially in light of government interest in greater regulation around football ownership.

Overall, the thesis sets out the policy area or club-level decision intervention in each Chapter, set within the different theoretical frameworks and shows some clear outcomes that may alter our assumptions around drivers of football attendance and football match outcomes.