Saturday in the stadium: On higher attendance on Saturdays in Norwegian Elitserien soccer league Stepan Ermakov and Alex Krumer* First version: April 2021; This version: April 2021 Date this version has been printed: 22 April 2021 Abstract: In this paper we examine data from soccer games played in the Norwegian Eliteserien male league during the seasons from 2009 to 2019. Our regression analysis, which controls for many potential confounding factors, finds that Saturday games attract close to 5 percent larger stadium attendance than Sunday games. A possible reason for this is the relatively late kick-off time of the Sunday games. Our results indicate that moving a large share of games from Sunday to Saturday would increase teams’ gate revenues that have had a negative trend for several years. These findings have implications for the stakeholders of the leagues, calendar committees, and local business. Keywords: Schedule effects, soccer, attendance demand, Eliteserien. JEL classification: D00, L00, D20, Z20. Address for correspondence: Stepan Ermakov, Faculty of Business Administration and Social Sciences, Molde University College, Britvegen 2, Molde, 6402, Norway,
[email protected]. Alex Krumer (corresponding author), Faculty of Business Administration and Social Sciences, Molde University College, Britvegen 2, Molde, 6402, Norway,
[email protected]. * The usual disclaimer applies. 1 1 Introduction There is a growing interest in studying the effect of schedule on attendance demand in professional soccer. For example, previous studies have shown that midweek games attract lower crowds in England (Buraimo, 2008; Buraimo & Simmons, 2015; Forrest & Simmons, 2006), Spain (Buraimo & Simmons, 2009), Germany (Krumer & Lechner, 2018; Schreyer & Däuper, 2018; Schreyer, Schmidt & Torgler, 2019), the Netherlands, (Besters, van Ours & van Tuijl, 2018), Norway (Kringstad, Solberg & Jacobsen, 2018), and Peru (Buraimo, Tena & de la Piedra, 2018).