Stealing the show? Foreign cheerleaders and baseball fan attendance in Taiwan’s CPBL

This paper examines the impact of foreign cheerleaders on stadium attendance in Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL). In March 2023, the Rakuten Monkeys signed South Korean cheerleader Lee Da-Hye, marking the first entry of a foreign cheerleader into the league. Her debut attracted widespread public attention, boosted attendance during the 2023 season, and prompted other teams to recruit Korean cheerleaders in subsequent years. Using a panel dataset of 1320 games from 2022 to 2025 and employing high-dimensional fixed-effects regressions, we estimate the effect of foreign cheerleaders on fan attendance. The results indicate that each additional foreign cheerleader increases attendance by about 4% on average. The effect was particularly strong in 2023, when Lee Da-Hye alone raised attendance by roughly 13%, but diminished in 2024 and 2025 as foreign cheerleaders became more common – consistent with a novelty effect. Heterogeneity across teams further suggests that success depends on differences in individual popularity and managerial execution. These findings contribute to the sports economics literature by identifying cheerleading as an overlooked demand shifter and demonstrating the broader importance of entertainment-driven strategies in professional sports.