Restructuring Ticket Pricing Policies by Implementing Innovative Pricing Strategies for Bundesliga Clubs (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, Cologne Business School Köln, course: Preispolitik, language: English, abstract: For hundreds of years people have been highly affine to any kind of sports. Thousands of people regularly watch sports events online and offline and in society the topic of a team¿s or an individual¿s performance is always passionately discussed. Taking a look at Europe the most popular sport is football. Mughai (2016, p. 13) elaborates that football - or sometimes called soccer to avoid interchanging with American football - is globally ranked first in terms of popularity. Supporters that are very passionate about their team are visiting the huge football stadiums week by week. As the capacity of a stadium is limited sometimes fans are even purchasing their entrance tickets weeks or months ahead of the event itself. Especially the German Bundesliga has been facing an enormous interest growth within the last years resulting in an average of 42.609 visitors per match day making the league the most visited one in Europe. (DFL, 2015, p. 22f)
Similar to the ever-growing popularity of sports, the costs are rising. This is caused by mounting player salaries, increased transfer fees and other operational expenses. (Drayer, Lee & Shapiro, 2012, p. 184; Breuer & Kemper, 2015, p. 142) Sport clubs therefore need to steadily open up and augment their sources of revenue: match day revenues, advertising, broadcasting, transfer fees and merchandising. (DFL, 2015, p. 26f) Some of these revenue streams can be actively influenced by the Bundesliga clubs whilst others are hard to affect. One of the determinants that can be modified is ticket pricing.

The objective of this Master Thesis is to explain the prevailing pricing strategy in the German Bundesliga and to present innovative, value-based pricing approaches which can be tested. Creating an understanding of the fans¿ willingness to pay and factors having impact on the purchase decision making process, a gap in research is supposed to be filled. In this Master Thesis the author aims to find sufficient, relevant, reliable and empirically proven answers to the following research questions:

1) Why have innovative value-based pricing strategies like dynamic pricing not yet been implemented in the German Bundesliga?
2) To what extant are fans willing to pay different prices depending on dynamic factors?
3) What determinants need to be taken care of when changing the prevailing pricing strategies of Bundesliga clubs?