HIFK Playoff Profit Calculator

This project delivers a scenario-based financial model designed to evaluate the profitability of playoff home games for a Liiga ice hockey team. The model supports decision-making under uncertainty by quantifying financial risk, break-even points, and upside potential across different playoff outcomes.

The primary objective was to move beyond intuition and provide management with a structured, transparent tool for playoff budgeting and risk assessment.

Playoff games represent one of the most financially volatile periods for a professional sports organization:

• The number of home games is unknown in advance
• Costs increase by playoff round
• Revenues depend heavily on attendance and pricing assumptions

Despite the importance of playoffs, financial planning is often based on rough estimates rather than structured scenario analysis.

Management needs clear answers to three critical questions:

• What is the profitability of a home playoff game?
• What is the profitability of a playoff run?
• How to optimize the profitability of a playoff run?

This project addresses those questions through a flexible, scenario-driven model.

The model is designed to be used both before and during playoffs.

The project aims to achieve the following objectives:

• Build a decision-support model usable both before and during playoffs
• Quantify downside risk and upside potential under uncertainty
• Identify key financial drivers affecting profitability
• Enable clear communication of financial scenarios to stakeholders

This is a scenario-based financial model, not a historical prediction model.

Key characteristics:

• Attendance modeled through adjustable scenarios
• Game-level revenues and costs calculated individually
• Cost structure increases by playoff round
• Each playoff round modeled independently

Explicit assumptions ensure transparency and allow rapid iteration as new information becomes available.

High-level structure:

• Centralized input layer for all assumptions
• Per-game revenue and cost calculations
• Round-level aggregation
• Full playoff run profitability analysis
• Break-even and sensitivity analysis

The modular structure allows fast updates without breaking downstream logic.

🔗 [Link to model structure overview]

The analysis reveals three key insights:

1. Playoff profitability is path-dependent
   Financial outcomes are driven by the sequence and number of home games, not by how far the team advances.
2. Attendance dominates outcomes
   Small changes in attendance assumptions have a greater impact than optimizing individual cost items.
3. Marginal value of a home playoff game increases by round
   The marginal financial value of a home playoff game increases significantly in later rounds, driven by higher attendance and revenue per game.

The model enables:

• More accurate playoff budgeting
• Clear communication of financial risk to leadership
• Scenario comparison for strategic planning
• Informed operational decisions related to staffing, pricing, and resource allocation

The framework is directly transferable to other teams, leagues, and event-driven businesses.

Current limitations:

• No probability weighting between playoff scenarios
• No integration of historical playoff performance data

Planned extensions:

• Probability-weighted scenario modeling
• Historical data integration
• Conversion into an interactive dashboard