View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Munich RePEc Personal Archive MPRA Munich Personal RePEc Archive Where did National Hockey League Fans go During the 2004-2005 Lockout?: An Analysis of Economic Competition Between Leagues Rascher Daniel and Brown Matt and Nagel Mark and McEvoy Chad University of San Francisco, University of South Carolina, University of South Carolina, Illinois State University 2009 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/25804/ MPRA Paper No. 25804, posted 12. October 2010 18:21 UTC Where did NHL Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? 1 RUNNING HEAD: Where did NHL Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? Where did National Hockey League Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? An Analysis of Economic Competition between Leagues Where did NHL Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? 2 ABSTRACT Identifying and evaluating competitors is a critical aspect of operating a sport organisation. However, North American sports franchises have a limited understanding of competitors in their geographic market – particularly when calculating the degree of competition from other sport teams. Increasing the understanding of local sport competitors, whether in the same or different professional leagues, is critical not only to future franchise operations, but also for potential litigation concerning relevant product markets. This article utilises a natural experiment involving the National Hockey League’s (NHL) 2004-2005 lockout to assess the competitiveness of the NHL with the National Basketball Association (NBA) and four minor hockey leagues. On average, the five potential competitor leagues attained a 2% increase in demand, all else equal, during the lockout period. For the NBA this translates into more than US$1 million per team in increased incremental ticket revenue. Keywords: relevant market, competition, demand, National Hockey League, regression analysis Where did NHL Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? 3 Where did National Hockey League Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? An Analysis of Economic Competition between Leagues 1 Introduction Competition in sports often refers to athletic competition on the field of play. In the business of sports, competition refers to enterprises that compete with each other for customers. It is often unclear, however, if teams in the same marketplace compete for the same customers. For instance, does a person living in Chicago make a choice to attend either a Major League Baseball (MLB) Chicago White Sox game or a MLB Chicago Cubs game based upon the price to attend, the quality of the team, the quality of the opponent, the stadium, or the presence of star players? Or, are the White Sox and the Cubs even competing for the same customers in their marketplace? Understanding and comparing the customer base becomes even more difficult when examining cross-sport and cross-level competition. In Los Angeles, does a consumer make a cross-sport choice to attend either the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Los Angeles Kings games or the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Los Angeles Lakers games? The potential cross-level competition affects hockey consumers in places like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They can chose between attending a major league NHL Philadelphia Flyers game or a minor league American Hockey League (AHL) game. Sport organisations not only compete for consumers’ ticket revenue in the marketplace but also for other revenues such as corporate sponsorship, Where did NHL Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? 4 licensed merchandise sales, and local broadcast rights. Teams in the same marketplace offer live in-person entertainment to fans, sponsor access to a target market, and contribute content to media companies. Possibly, teams in the same marketplace may compete with one another for some combination of all these revenue sources, or the teams might not be competitors as their potential consumer bases do not overlap. Recently, the discussion of professional sport marketplace competition received attention when MLB’s Montreal Expos moved to Washington D.C. Peter Angelos, owner of MLB’s Baltimore Orioles (located roughly 40 miles from Washington, D.C.), demanded and received compensation from MLB to supplement the team’s potential lost revenues due to the new competition in the marketplace (Nagel et al., 2007). Similar concerns arose when MLB’s Oakland Athletics investigated a possible move to Santa Clara County, California which is within the territorial boundaries of MLB’s San Francisco Giants. Throughout league relocation cases, one of the central questions has been the degree to which teams are in competition with each other for fans, and by extension, corporate sponsors, advertising revenues, and media rights. These disputes between teams within leagues have occasionally resulted in litigation regarding potential revenue losses due to increased competition for consumers in the marketplace. In the United States, antitrust law governs most of these disputes. In these types of sports cases, teams or leagues often have to determine the definition of the product and geographic markets as their first step in assessing market power. The scope of the product Where did NHL Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? 5 and geographic markets relates to the degree of competition with other sports teams, leagues, or even other forms of entertainment. However, there has not been a consensus in terms of product market definition by the courts (Freitas, 2000). Three cases illustrate this point. In International Boxing Club v. United States (1959), the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court determination that the promotion of championship boxing matches, in contrast to all professional boxing events, constituted a relevant product market. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, in NCAA v. Board of Regents (1984), that live college football telecasts were a distinct relevant market because the audience is unique and attractive to advertisers and competitors are not able to offer programming that can attract a similar audience. However, in Chicago Professional Sports LTD. v. NBA (1996), the circuit court determined that viewers of basketball games are not unique and that advertisers can market to them through other channels. As the courts have not established a consensus on marketplace competition for professional sports teams, when teams have attempted to move into another marketplace, they have often had to make economic arguments justifying their move. When the National Football League’s (NFL) Oakland Raiders moved to Los Angeles, the NFL attempted to prohibit their move (Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission v. National Football League, 1984). One issue in the suit was the definition of the relevant market. The Raiders argued that the relevant geographic market was Southern California while professional football was the relevant product market. Lehn Where did NHL Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? 6 and Sykuta (1997, p. 549) stated that “The NFL countered that the appropriate market was all forms of entertainment throughout the United States. The court accepted the narrower definition offered by the Raiders. In doing so, it offered no indication that either interchangeability of products or cross-price elasticities were seriously considered in the deliberation.” Lehn and Sykuta further noted that this was in conflict with the court’s rationale, as it earlier stated that the appropriate tests for determining the relevant product market were both reasonable interchangeability and cross-price elasticities (see Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum at 1393). The inconsistency of the court’s evaluation of sports business competition demonstrates the need to study competition in the sports business industry (Lehn and Sykuta, 1997). Leaving aside issues ranging from media rights to sponsorship, sports business competition for live in-person consumption in one geographic area can involve four different competitive environments: a) the same sport at different levels of competition (e.g. the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks and the AHL’s Chicago Wolves), b) different sports at the same level of competition (e.g. the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings and the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers), c) the same sport at the same level of competition (e.g. the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers), and d) different sports at different levels of competition (e.g. the NBA’s Chicago Bulls and the AHL’s Chicago Wolves). Of course, this does not include all of the possibilities for a sport competing with non-sports forms of entertainment (e.g., movies, the beach). This paper addresses competition for Where did NHL Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? 7 live in-person attendance between the same sport at different levels of competition and different sports at the same level of competition. Prior to the 2004-2005 season, the NHL locked out its players in an effort to reform its economic system. As a result of the lockout, a natural experiment was created that can be utilised to measure competition between the same sport at different levels of competition (Hypothesis 1 in Table 1) and different sports at the same level of competition (Hypothesis 2 in Table 1). Specifically, the labour stoppage afforded the authors an opportunity to determine if live in-person consumers of NHL games instead went to NBA games or minor league hockey games during the lockout. This issue is relevant to sport managers for many reasons. Most importantly, it affects the establishment of price levels. When setting prices, an organisation must understand the competitiveness of its market. It has to recognise who it is competing against in the marketplace and incorporate that information while determining pricing. Additionally, it may impact scheduling of games and other ways to differentiate the product. Insert Table 1 about here. 2 Review of Literature Where did NHL Fans go during the 2004-2005 Lockout? 8 Relevant literature concerning the competition for consumers in the marketplace by professional sports teams primarily includes research regarding sports team relocations and the impacts of the relocations on league outcomes.