Saturday in the stadium: on higher attendance on Saturdays in Norwegian Eliteserien soccer league

Research question This paper is motivated by the relatively late kick-off time of Sunday games (18:00), which is the main day in the Norwegian Eliteserien men's soccer league. The paper investigates whether Saturday games attract a larger audience.Research methods We used data from 11 seasons between 2009 and 2019. In our multivariate regression analyzes, we controlled for more than 30 confounding factors.Results and findings We find that Saturday games attract close to 5% larger stadium attendance than Sunday games.Implications Our results indicate that moving a large share of games from Sunday to Saturday would increase the gate revenues of teams that have had a negative trend for several years. These findings have implications for the stakeholders of the leagues, calendar committees, and local businesses.