As I eat my lunch, I often have a browse of the FT data blog, ONS, data.gov.uk or the London datastore. Last week I had a look at the data on Olympic tickets sales and wondered what if any interesting patterns in the data there were.
I decided to build a little model to understand how different factors affected the average price of a ticket sold to the public. Unfortunately the data is incomplete in some sports (boxing, wrestling and gymnastics) as there hasn’t been full disclosure on the relative number of tickets sold to the public rather than corporate sponsors and for some events (road cycling), the comparison is affected by possible attendance for non-ticket events.
So the steps to estimate the cost of the average ticket coming out of the model are:
(A) multiply the number of people attending (proxy for capacity) by -0.000044
(B) multiply the % of tickets sold to the public by -1.18
(C) Decide if you want to see a medal event, if so, add £65.
(D) Choose your sport from the table below
(E) Predicted ticket price is calculated by A+B+C+D
Athletics | £ 220.26 |
Cycling Track | £ 145.15 |
Diving | £ 168.33 |
Equestrian | £ 141.69 |
Hockey | £ 129.91 |
Swimming | £ 148.11 |
Synchro | £ 123.92 |
This is obviously a very simplistic model that only considers 4 factors – capacity of stadium, how much is given to the public, whether a medal would be won and the sport itself. The results seem quite intuitive – but there is an issue in that sports are only played in one stadium, and the capacity may be partially determined by either the assumed popularity or demand for tickets, or the physical constraints of the space. Comparing an event in stadium with 10,000 seats compared to one with 80,000 seats only affects price by £3, so this doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in its own right. Ultimately the analysis is useful, but direction of causality is difficult to assess.
What is perhaps more interesting is when looking at some descriptive statistics - in this case the average price of a public ticket in different sports and then looking at the premium you would have had to pay for seeing a medal being won - basically you're looking at paying at least 50% more on average and the average across all sessions of sports was £93.
No medals | Medal | Premium | Medal mark up | |
Athletics | 87 | 235 | 148 | 170% |
Cycling Road | 13 | 24 | 12 | 96% |
Cycling Track | 71 | 164 | 93 | 132% |
Diving | 85 | 154 | 69 | 82% |
Equestrian | 56 | 104 | 48 | 85% |
Hockey | 41 | 70 | 29 | 72% |
Swimming | 67 | 167 | 100 | 150% |
Synchro | 47 | 72 | 25 | 53% |
And now for a message for our corporate sponsors:
Looking at the number of extra tickets that sponsors and dignataties received, we can see that there was a greater number (and proportion) of tickets given to 'clients' at medal events. In the non-medal road cycling events, only 1 per cent of those with tickets (ie in a grandstand) were corporates, but this jumped to 25% in the medal events. In the main stadium, an extra 7,931 seats were taken up for sessions where medals were won by corporate guests.
I appreciate the need for corporate sponsors and dignataries to be given tickets, but when one can see that in track cycling and swimming more than half of the spectators were there because of who they were.
Non medal event | Medal event | Extra tickets to corporates | |
Athletics | 15,203 | 23,134 | 7,931 |
Cycling Road | 59 | 766 | 707 |
Cycling Track | 2,179 | 2,264 | 85 |
Diving | 2,719 | 3,677 | 959 |
Equestrian | 3,893 | 5,109 | 1,216 |
Hockey | 2,880 | 4,919 | 2,038 |
Swimming | 4,589 | 6,090 | 1,501 |
Synchro | 2,476 | 3,059 | 583 |
Non medal event | Medal event | Additional % of crowd on a jolly | |
Athletics | 24% | 37% | 13% |
Cycling Road | 1% | 25% | 24% |
Cycling Track | 51% | 54% | 3% |
Diving | 27% | 36% | 10% |
Equestrian | 19% | 27% | 8% |
Hockey | 21% | 35% | 14% |
Swimming | 39% | 55% | 16% |
Synchro | 20% | 24% | 5% |
One final thing - 76 sessions had no medal events and 46 did- this is a split of 62%:38%, but when the total revenue generated is calculated - 64% of all revenue from these events came from sessions with medal events, and half of all revenue from the above events came from athletics medal events, so charging a premium, clearly helped out financially. Others might ask if non medal events were subsidised, though the accessibility of the games to paying members of the public is another matter.
