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Distance Matters - Evidence from Professional Team Sports

Author

Listed:
  • Harald Oberhofer
  • Tassilo Philippovich
  • Hannes Winner

Abstract

This paper assesses the role of distance in professional team sports, taking the example of football (soccer). We argue that a team's performance in terms of scored and conceded goals decreases with the distance to the foreign playing venue. To test this hypothesis empirically, we investigate 6,389 away games from the German Football Premier League ('Erste Deutsche Bundesliga') between the playing seasons 1986-87 and 2006-07. We find that distance contributes significantly in explaining a guest team's propensity to concede goals, but not so for scoring goals. Focusing on the difference between scored and conceded goals ('goal difference') as a measure of the overall success of a football team, we observe a significant and non-monotonic impact of distance on team performance.

Suggested Citation

  • Harald Oberhofer & Tassilo Philippovich & Hannes Winner, 2008. "Distance Matters - Evidence from Professional Team Sports," Working Papers 2008-16, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck.
    • Handle: RePEc:inn:wpaper:2008-16
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    File URL: https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c4041030/wpaper/2008-16.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. van Ommeren, Jos & Rietveld, Piet & Nijkamp, Peter, 1997. "Commuting: In Search of Jobs and Residences," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 402-421, November.
    2. Jos van Ommeren & Piet Rietveld & Peter Nijkamp & Jos van Ommeren & Piet Rietveld & Peter Nijkamp, 2004. "Job Moving, Residential Moving, and Commuting: A Search Perspective," Chapters, in: Location, Travel and Information Technology, chapter 11, pages 223-246, Edward Elgar Publishing.
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    Cited by:

    1. Oberhofer, Harald & Philippovich, Tassilo & Winner, Hannes, 2010. "Distance matters in away games: Evidence from the German football league," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 200-211, April.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Professional team performance; distance; event count data; poisson regression model;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L25 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Performance
    • L83 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Sports; Gambling; Restaurants; Recreation; Tourism
    • C29 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Other

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