Outcome Uncertainty and the Couch Potato Audience

Abstract Previous studies of attendance demand for professional team sports have failed to yield clear‐cut findings on the importance of outcome uncertainty to consumers. But potentially fewer problems should arise in examining the link between outcome uncertainty and demand in the television market for team sports, which of the case of English Premier League football is in fact a more important component in total club revenue. This study models both the choice of which games to show and the size of audience attracted by each game, exploiting data on audience sizes for games between 1993 and 2002. We propose a new measure of match outcome uncertainty and, from our results, both the broadcaster and the audience appear interested in competitive balance.