Decision-making in professional football: an empirical analysis of club members’ voting behaviour

European Sport Management Quarterly. 2021.

Coates D. C., Fahrner M., Pawlowski T.

Research question

Despite significantly increasing membership in professional football clubs over time, few members exercise their right to vote. We explore whether factors found to influence turnout to shareholder voting and political elections are also relevant in this peculiar setting. Given the geographically widespread distribution of members, a particular focus is put on the relevance of travel distance to the meeting place.

Research methods

Data come from an online survey of n = 9090 voting-eligible members of one of the biggest football clubs in Germany. A member’s ‘habit for voting’ serves as dependent variable in our regression models. Given the ordinal nature of this variable, ordered probit models were estimated which allow addressing the size and relevance of non-instrumental benefits from voting.

Results and findings

Next to some setting-specific variables, we find that several socio-demographic characteristics have statistically significant effects on the members’ habit for voting. Also in line with the general voting literature, the distance between one’s home and the meeting place is significantly and negatively related to the probability of voting. Remarkably, however, this effect is hardly big enough to materially change the habit for voting.

Implications

Our study provides some evidence of ‘temporal consistency’ and ‘setting independency’ for the factors associated with voter turnout. At the same time, it illustrates a practically highly relevant case where statistical and economic significance of a variable differ. Since the effect of distance between one’s home and the meeting place is comparably small, online voting or voting by mail might have little impact on turnout in practice.

Keywords: participation, football, voting, governance, co-determination

Publication based on the results of: Исследования цифровых инноваций и организационных изменений в компаниях (2021)