I wrote a blog a little while ago saying that clubs benefit because attendance rises at league games after hosting a World Cup or European Championship. This is based on some work I have been doing with Bastien Drut and we now have a paper which shows the size of the benefit in much more detail. We estimate that benefit is of the order of a 15-25% boost in attendance in the five seasons following the event compared to the season before it took place. The impact can be clearly seen in this chart:
We find that host stadiums tend to get an extra boost, but teams in the top two divisions obtain a significant boost even if they did not host games. We have third and fourth division data for England and find that there is no impact on clubs at this level. We also have financial data for English clubs for the 1966 World Cup and Euro96- and we identify a significant financial gain.
Finally, we make some rough calculations of the size of the economic benefit. This depends to a large degree on prevailing ticket prices. But even in a country like England which has high ticket prices the value of the benefit is well below the costs that are normally associated with hosting these events.
You can download the paper by clicking on the link below:
The private benefit of public funding
