Modeling attendance at Spanish professional football league

Prediction of demand for professional sports is increasingly drawing the attention of economists.We apply linear mixed models for modeling attendance figures at Spanish professional football. We investigate economic variables, such as the price of the tickets or the size of the market, and sporting variables, such as the quality of a team or the level of competition within the league, as potential predictors of attendance. It turns out that a model with temporally correlated random team effects provides good forecasts of attendance at a time horizon of two seasons. Results from this model agree with economic theory.