The impact of physical attractiveness on the popularity of female tennis players in online media

The discussion about the impact of physical attractiveness on popularity of competitive athletes has received much attention from scholars as well as from media around the world. We provide new insights to this debate by estimating correlation-coefficients and regression-models to test whether and to which extent physical attractiveness of professional female tennis players affects their popularity in online media. Based on a sample of the top 100 WTA single ranking of one selected calendar week in 2011 we find that physical attractiveness increases significantly the popularity on Facebook, WTA news, Kicker.de, the homepage of the Tennis Life Magazine and Google.