Competitive balance and intensity in European women's elite football: A key failure factor?

AIM / RESEARCH QUESTION Women's football is a growing topic for the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) for the last years. However, knowledge about European women's football has still to be improved, in particular on competitive balance (CB) and competitive intensity (CI). The smaller interest for women's football compared with men could be partially due to a worst CB and CI. In this paper, our aim is to check that there are important differences between European women and men's elite football in terms of CB and CI and consider how improving these indicators for women. 2.�THEORETICAL BACKGROUND CB postulates the necessity of equilibrium between the teams in a league in order to guarantee uncertainty of outcome and thus generate public demand. Fort and Maxcy (2003, p. 155) distinguish two lines of literature: the analysis of CB which "focuses on what has happened to competitive balance over time or as a result of changes in the business practices of pro sports leagues"; the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis which analyses its effect on fans. But is it relevant to only talk about "competitive balance"? In the European leagues, there is a promotions/relegations system (opened leagues) and so there are sporting prizes at the bottom of the league standing, unlike the American leagues. An unbalanced championship can be potentially more interesting than a more balanced one if each team has a sporting prize to defend, as in the first system, whereas the second offers few sporting prizes. The importance of sporting prizes leads to talk about the notion of competitive intensity, as proposed by Kringstad and Gerrard (2005). 3.�RESEARCH DESIGN