Comparing Attendances and Memberships in the Australian Football League: The Case of Hawthorn

While the linkage between team performance and attendances is well established, there has been negligible previous research using club memberships as an alternative indicator of demand for sport. Little attention has been paid to how the number of memberships is affected by common measures of team performance, such as the team's win-ratio. This study utilises a previously unavailable long range time-series data set of annual memberships for an Australian Football League (AFL) club, Hawthorn FC. A succession of basic correlation analyses demonstrates that, while the relation between club membership numbers and win-ratios is strongly positive as it is for attendances (for most of the sample), some of the finer properties are substantially different. It is suggested that much of the reason for this lies in differences between the segmented nature of these markets for attendances and memberships.