Econometric modelling of market prices of football club sponsors' stocks

Nowadays sport is a huge element of business, and not only as entertainment. While the entertainment function is very important for investors, money allocation may be just as important. Sport generates new financial instruments for investments – footballers’ performance rights. These rights are the subject of transactions between clubs, and could generate a return on the club's investment into the player. But still, the major motivation in sport financing is building a strong recognizable brand for a sponsor’s company.

Sport sponsorship is very popular because it is the easiest way to create a positive image of the company. Additionally, it perfectly reflects the policy of enterprises willing to be socially responsible. Firms financing sport set up a target for themselves  – sometimes it means winning, but sometimes it is only important to be part of an event. Everything depends on the firms’ policy. Even the event itself could create added value for the sponsor, by advertising (e.g. showing the logo of the firm during a match in TV broadcasting), for example.

The aim of this article is to verify the hypothesis that sporting results have a significant impact on the stock exchange quotation of the sport clubs’ sponsors. We will try to answer the question – is the policy of the company effective, related to sport sponsorship? We will use generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity ((G)ARCH) type models with daily data from companies quoted on the European stock exchanges. The results of football matches will be taken from the web page www.betexplorer.com for adequate time periods.