RESEARCH ARTICLE
Playoffs or Just League: A Debate in Brazilian Football
Thadeu Gasparetto1, Angel Barajas1, 2, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 9
Issue: Suppl-1, M11
First Page: 94
Last Page: 103
Publisher ID: TOSSJ-9-94
DOI: 10.2174/1875399X01609010094
Article History:
Received Date: 16/07/2015Revision Received Date: 18/08/2015
Acceptance Date: 07/09/2015
Electronic publication date: 12/05/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
After several consecutive seasons in the league, the Campeonato Brasileiro may return to the playoffs format. The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) and some Brazilian clubs commented that this format will provide higher competitive balance and increase the interest of Brazilian football fans. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to assess the competitiveness and the interest of Brazilian fans in the last twenty-four seasons: Playoffs (1991-2002) and League (2003-2014). The competitiveness is evaluated by Herfindahl Index of Competitive Balance (HICB) and C4 Index of Competitive Balance and the interest measured by the average attendance to the stadiums. The results show that Brazilian League has become more balanced since 2003 season and football fans are more interested in the tournament with league format. The main conclusion is that the change to the playoffs would not improve the competitiveness and the interest of fans. Moreover some problems of the Brazilian football market are commented and some solutions proposed to improve it.