Ticket consumption forecast for Brazilian championship games

Abstract For the efficiency of sales and marketing management of athletic clubs, it is crucial to find a way to appropriately estimate the level of demand for sporting events. More precise estimates allow for an appropriate financial and operational plan and a higher quality of service delivered to the fans. The focus of this study is to analyze and forecast the ticket consumption for soccer games in Brazilian stadiums. We compare the results of the regression model with normally distributed errors (benchmark), the TOBIT model and the Gamma generalized linear model. The models include explanatory variables related to the economic environment, product quality, as well as monetary and non-monetary incentives that people are given to attend sporting events at stadiums. We show that most of these variables are statistically significant to explain the amount of fans that go to stadiums. We used different measures of accuracy to evaluate the performance of demand forecasts and concluded that Gamma generalized linear model presented better results to forecast the ticket consumption for Brazilian championship games, when compared to a benchmark.