Dyed in the wool? An empirical note on fan loyalty

This article attempts to investigate empirically the strength of intracity football club support and seeks to test the commonly held belief among the sports community that supporters will not switch allegiance between city rivals very readily. To test this phenomenon, data on the attendances of five English and two Italian city rival clubs is used to conduct a cointegration analysis. The results imply that a stable relationship does not exist between the attendance series which throws doubt on the proposition that supporters of a team are unlikely to switch their support to a rival club. To test the possibility that this result could be due to fickle supporters ceasing to attend, a sensitivity analysis is conducted between attendances and performance. © 2012 Taylor & Francis.