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Introduction
Football is watched and played by billions of people around the globe, and Europe is the most noted football market regarding revenue and total level of competition. Five of the world's most renowned national leagues are located in Europe (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France) and generate very considerable fan interest and turnover (Statista, 2018). Frequently, the question is asked if these leagues actually (still) are exciting. Media often states that this is not the case for the German Bundesliga (Fritsch, 2018; Gerards, 2018; Rehbock, 2018) because Bayern Munich has won 16 championship titles since the introduction of the three-point rule (season 1995/96) and the league has not seen another champion for the past seven seasons. Bayern's national dominance is unparalleled in current European football. Nonetheless, the average stadium attendance in the Bundesliga has been the highest in Europe (42,388) over the past years with a utilization of 91% (Batardière, 2018) and a record turnover of €4.02 billion for 2018/19 (DFL, 2020).
This contradicts what the pioneers of sport economic research Rottenberg and Neale posit: That balanced competition and therefore uncertainty of outcome is more attractive to spectators and should be the purpose of league organizers. According to Rottenberg (1956), this should be achieved through a perfect distribution of player talents. Whereas Neale (1964) describes his proposition with the Louis–Schmeling paradox and mentions league standing effects. More recent research concludes that the demand for participating in or watching football matches somehow depends on the suspense of a tight competition (uncertainty of outcome) (Szymanski, 2003) and shows that perceived competitive balance (CB) is the most significant indicator for a leagues' attractiveness (Koenigstorfer et al., 2010). But the current situation in the German Bundesliga demonstrates that there has to be something else that attracts fans to the stadiums and causes them to spend money on watching football. Therefore, it might be time to rethink the existing theories of the economics and management of professional football (Ramchandani et al., 2018).
In 2004, Kringstad and Gerrard developed the theory of competitive intensity (CI) and defined it as “the degree of competition within the league/tournament with regards to its prize structure” (Kringstad and Gerrard, 2004, p. 120). As all European football leagues are not just about contention for...