Who Are The Bandwagoners?

Part of the rivalry between AFL clubs is accusing other teams’ supporters of 'jumping on the bandwagon’ – that is, implying that they have a greater than average tendency to turn up/’come out of the woodwork’ when their team is winning more games. But for which teams is this accusation justified? To find out, I collected season-by-season numbers on a team’s winning percentage and average attendance (during the home-and-away season only), and estimated the following relationship:

Percentage deviation of team’s average attendance per game in season from trend average attendance*
= α
+ β x team’s winning percentage in season
+ γ x percentage deviation of league’s average attendance per game in season from trend average attendance**

*All trend measures are a 13-term Henderson moving average.
**Endogeneity?... Meh.

So the stronger the positive relationship between a team’s winning percentage and its percentage deviation in average attendance per game from trend average attendance, the more fair-weathered a club’s supporters are. I’ve only estimated this relationship from 1982 onwards (when South Melbourne became Sydney), as I didn’t want to hold today’s supporters to account for the fickleness of their long-dead predecessors.

And here are the results:

Estimate of β*

Sydney – 0.393
Collingwood – 0.356
Melbourne – 0.298
Western Bulldogs – 0.284
St. Kilda – 0.264
Kangaroos – 0.239
Richmond – 0.219
Geelong – 0.171
West Coast – 0.165
Carlton – 0.125
Fremantle – 0.110
Adelaide – 0.095
Essendon – 0.090
Brisbane – 0.084
Hawthorn – 0.030
*Port Adelaide is excluded as it has not played enough seasons.

Three points to note:

1) The non-Victorian teams are less likely to have ‘bandwagon jumpers’. Although Sydney is at the top of the table, a lot of that result is driven by the mid-1980s – take that period away and they fall to around the middle. The most likely explanation is that the smaller capacity of the non-Victorian grounds puts a constraint on how many ‘bandwagon jumpers’ there can be.

2) Collingwood is second! I’ve called Collingwood supporters a lot of things in my time, but I didn’t think they were fickle. I expected them to be down near the bottom with other well-supported clubs like Carlton and Essendon. (Although it could be argued that a successful Collingwood brings out more supporters from other teams.)

3) A recent history of success appears to be inversely related to ‘bandwagonism’. The bottom seven clubs have won 20 of the past 26 premierships, while the top five have won only two. (As further evidence of this claim, note that there was a lot more fickleness from Hawthorn supporters once their golden era in the ‘80s was over.)

Oh well, at the least, now we all have another reason to bag Collingwood.