The Designated Player Policy Rule and Attendance Demand in Major League Soccer

Evidence suggests that Major League Soccer's designated player (DP) rule increased match-day attendance in its inaugural season leading to expansion of this policy. However, there is a need to examine whether these findings are robust. Therefore, this paper uses the DP rule as a natural experiment to identify its effect on match-day attendance using a difference-in-difference estimation strategy. In contrast to existing research, when using a difference-in-difference estimator, the statistically significant effect of DPs on attendance vanishes but may be recovered when omitting domestic DPs from the set of DPs.