Television Broadcast Demand for National Football League Contests

Abstract

Previous research estimating demand for sporting events has focused largely on professional baseball and European football (soccer), using attendance as a proxy of demand. This article estimates demand for National Football League games using television broadcast ratings, permitting the additional novelty of generating estimations in both the home and visiting clubs’ markets. The study uses a linear mixed model to demonstrate that many of the factors influencing attendance hold true with respect to television demand. Furthermore, many of the factors influencing demand for the aforementioned leagues hold true for the National Football League. Team quality, tenure in the market, and games contested in primetime all increased ratings, while income and sharing a market were negatively associated with ratings. Intradivisional games showed no statistically significant effect. The findings further suggest that the factors influencing ratings in home and road markets are essentially similar.