Examining the return dynamics of Bitcoin and Ethereum around major international football tournaments

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Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Cryptocurrencies have become increasingly important alternative investment assets, yet their returns remain sensitive to market conditions and external developments. Major international football tournaments attract substantial global attention, but evidence on whether these periods coincide with systematic changes in cryptocurrency returns remains limited. This study examines the return dynamics of Bitcoin and Ethereum before, during, and after major international football tournaments using monthly data from May 2016 to December 2025. Tournament-specific OLS regressions with market controls, calendar and trend adjustments, Newey–West HAC inference, and Benjamini-Hochberg FDR correction were employed in this study. The results show substantial heterogeneity across tournaments, cryptocurrencies, and temporal phases. Although several tournament-window coefficients are nominally significant, broader FDR adjustment substantially narrows the supported findings. The strongest evidence is concentrated around the FIFA World Cup, with a negative association between the tournament period and Bitcoin returns, and a negative associations between the pre-tournament periods and Ethereum returns. International football tournament periods are not uniformly associated with cryptocurrency returns, and the observed patterns depend on the specific asset, tournament phase, and event context. These findings are consistent with a potential behavioral or investor-attention mechanism, although attention and sentiment are not directly measured.

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    • Figure 1. The return for both Bitcoin and Ethereum from 2016M5 to 2025M12
    • Table 1. Major international football tournaments included in the analysis
    • Table 2. Descriptive statistics
    • Table 3. Classical assumption test
    • Table 4. Regression results in specific mega sport-football event
    • Table 5. Robust OLS Estimates with HAC Newey–West Standard Errors and Additional Controls, Bitcoin
    • Table 6. Robust OLS Estimates with HAC Newey–West Standard Errors and Additional Controls, Ethereum
    • Table 7. Robustness with Month-of-Year Fixed Effects and Linear Trend, Bitcoin
    • Table 8. Robustness with month-of-year fixed effects and linear trend, Ethereum
    • Table 9. Robustness with lagged trading volume, month-of-year fixed effects and linear trend, Bitcoin
    • Table 10. Robustness with lagged trading volume, month-of-year fixed effects and linear trend, Ethereum
    • Table 11. Leave-one-edition-out robustness analysis: FIFA World Cup
    • Table 12. Leave-one-edition-out robustness analysis: Euro Cup
    • Table 13. Benjamini–Hochberg FDR-Adjusted P-values
    • Conceptualization
      Wendy Wendy, Hansen Tandra
    • Investigation
      Wendy Wendy, Hansen Tandra, Mochammad Ridwan Ristyawan
    • Project administration
      Wendy Wendy
    • Supervision
      Wendy Wendy
    • Validation
      Wendy Wendy, Mochammad Ridwan Ristyawan
    • Writing – review & editing
      Wendy Wendy, Mochammad Ridwan Ristyawan
    • Data curation
      Hansen Tandra
    • Formal Analysis
      Hansen Tandra, Mochammad Ridwan Ristyawan
    • Methodology
      Hansen Tandra, Mochammad Ridwan Ristyawan
    • Visualization
      Hansen Tandra
    • Writing – original draft
      Hansen Tandra