A tiny match-fixing scandal involving only a few players can permanently depress stadium attendance for an entire sports league.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Thin Scandals, Lasting Damage: The Impact of Match-Fixing on Football Attendance in South Korea
SSRN · 6402318
The Takeaway
In South Korea's K-League, researchers found that each individual player implicated in a scandal caused a 5% drop in fans across the board. This suggests that public trust in sports integrity is incredibly fragile; even minor, isolated cheating by a handful of people causes outsized, league-wide economic damage that lasts for years.
From the abstract
This paper examines the impact of the 2011 match-fixing scandal in South Korea's K-League on consumer demand, measured by stadium attendance. Although the scandal involved only 21 matches and a relatively small number of players, it generated substantial integrity concerns among supporters. Using a difference-indifferences framework, we exploit variation in club-level exposure to implicated players by comparing six non-involved clubs to those with one or more implicated players. Controlling for