Positive externalities from professional football clubs in the metropolitan rhine-ruhr, germany: Trickle-down effects associated with promotion and relegation

Hosting sport events is costly, but the positive impact of hosting sport events has not been studied well. We consider the promotion of physical activity, known as the trickle-down effect, to be a new dimension of this kind of impact. Using exogenous variations in promotion and relegation in the Bundesliga 1, we test the effect of the presence of a Bundesliga 1 club on local non-profit football club membership. Using German city-level annual non-profit sport club membership data from the metropolitan Rhine-Ruhr, we group cities with experience of either promotion or relegation as treatment cities and other cities as the comparison group. Difference-in-difference analyses show that promotion (using a strict definition of promotion) of local professional football clubs increases non-profit football club membership by 14% while relegation does not affect membership. The presence of Bundesliga 1 clubs in a city increases non-profit football club membership by 11%. Falsification tests support the idea that the impact of promotion on membership results in a net increase in membership.