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.