Sports economics

Antitrust litigation against the NCAA has focused on its members' collusive restraint on athlete compensation at levels below marginal revenue product. The recent O'Bannon v. NCAA and In Re NCAA Grant-in-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation have both prescribed a relevant market for "college education" where schools compete for athlete labor by offering tuition and fee or cost-of-attendance offsets. This article argues that this unitary definition conflates two separate products, academic education and athletic participation, that NCAA members offer as a bundled tie. The NCAA has mandated purchase of the tied product, academic education, as a prerequisite for access to intercollegiate athletics participation, the tying product. Paradoxically, the NCAA has then argued that this bundled tie, which this article argues violates the Supreme Court's three-pronged 'quasi' per-se rule prohibiting tying arrangements, represents a claimed 'pro-competitive justification' by integrating athletics and academics. This article offers evidence that this tying arrangement serves no legitimate pro-competitive purpose under the NCAA model of amateurism. Rather, it extracts consumer surplus, enhances dominant cartel members' market power, and forecloses competition not only from non-members but also from smaller NCAA member-schools. As such, the NCAA model of amateurism violates antitrust law governing tying arrangements and should be enjoined.

Faced with significant antitrust scrutiny, particularly from ongoing cases, the NCAA has sought to justify, under the rule of reason, the competitive restrictions its collegiate model of amateurism imposes by claiming procompetitive benefits. This article examines the NCAA's arguments and presents five findings: (1) the procompetitive justifications that the NCAA has offered for its restraint on athlete payments have little, if any, economic merit and do not justify the consumer injury resulting from the restraint; (2) absent the restraint, the minimum amount public P5 conference schools alone could have paid athletes is approximately $5.2 billion between 2003–2004 and 2014–2015, approximately two-thirds of which would have been used to compensate football and men's basketball players, indicating that the consumer injury resulting from the NCAA's restraint on trade has caused significant antitrust damages; (3) contrary to the NCAA's claims, empirical and documentary evidence demonstrates that directly compensating FBS/D1 athletes would not result in decreased consumer demand; (4) " competitive balance, " when analyzed in an antitrust setting, does not support the NCAA's claims; and (5) evidence, including the over one million documents released from the academic/athletic fraud investigation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, demonstrates significant consumer injury associated with the integration of academics and amateur revenue sport athletics. Such findings stand in direct opposition to the NCAA's claim of procompetitive benefits from integrating athletics and academics under its amateur model.

The link between team payroll and competitive balance plays a central role in the theory of team sports but is seldom investigated empirically. This paper uses data on team payrolls in Major League Baseball between 1980 and 2000 to examine the link and implements Granger causality tests to establish whether the relationship runs from payroll to performance or vice versa. While there is no evidence that causality runs from payroll to performance over the entire sample period, the data shows that the cross section correlation between payroll and performance increased significantly in the 1990s. As a comparison, the paper examines the relationship between pay and performance in English soccer, and it is shown that Granger causality from higher payrolls to better performance cannot be rejected. We argue that this difference may be a consequence of the open market for player talent that obtains in soccer compared to the significant restrictions on trade that exist in Major League Baseball.

This paper will offer an economic history perspective on match-fixing based on economic models which explain corruption as a rational decision-making process in which a potentially corrupt athlete weighs up various probabilities. Examples will be taken
from sport worldwide including American college sports, NBA basketball, British horseracing, Australian Rules football, and sumo wrestling in Japan where large databases of actual results over time have allowed possible patterns of match-fixing (as
opposed to individual instances) to be identified by the use of probability theory.

This paper analyzes the changes induced by the newly introduced UCI Pro Tour on the behavior of racing teams. We develop an oligopolistic model starting from the well-known Cournot framework to analyze why the UCI Pro Tour fails to reach its primary aim, namely to increase overall competition among professional cycling teams. In particular we show that the pattern of non-competitive behavior displayed by race teams is the result of a poorly designed Pro Tour licensing assignment procedure. Empirical findings confirm that teams put forth low effort in a high percentage of tour events, reserving their greatest effort for races organized in their home countries. This less-than-optimal performance pattern is the result of an organizational design that focuses solely on financial requirements and does not include incentives related to race performance. The study concludes with the recommendation that the current “closed league” organizational structure be replaced with a relegation system.

Using 2008-2009 data, we identify winning input combinations for the game of cricket in two different formats: 50-over one-day internationals and 20-over games from Twenty20 internationals and the Indian Premier League. We find that attacking batting and bowling are the best determinants of the winning probability in both formats in an international setting despite their 30-over difference. Interestingly, attacking batting and defensive bowling are the optimal input combinations in the league version of the 20-over format. Finally, we speculate about their implications for the future of cricket, especially for the popularity of formats, choices of players, and player development.

An attendance equation is estimated using data on individual games played in the Spanish First Division Football League. The specification includes as explanatory factors: economic variables, quality, uncertainty and opportunity costs. We concentrate the analysis on some specification issues such as controlling the effect of unobservables given the panel data structure of the data set, the type of functional form and the potential endogeneity of prices. We obtain the expected effects on attendance for all the variables. The estimated price elasticities are smaller than one in absolute value as usually occurs in this literature but are sensitive to the specification issues.

There is little debate that baseball is "America's pastime". From rural towns to urban areas, from small children to old men, across the United States baseball is a game that has been passionately played and followed by people of all ages, races and religions. Baseball's vital involvements in American cultural history and evolution have engrained it into American history forever. This aspect of baseball separates it from other sports leagues and truly legitimizes its label as America's pastime.

The sudden rise of coronavirus in the world had various effects on the sports industry. Nevertheless, sports organizations around the world adopted new and different methods to manage the crisis, which in turn, enriched global knowledge of sports management. Also, some industries changed their products and adapted their structure and performance according to the new situation. The new Experiences gained during the pandemic showed that sports organizations need crisis management programs to deal with crises in the future. So, it's necessary to manage sports organizations with a different perspective and new plans to encounter future needs and problems. To do this, sports managers must learn from the experiences of the pandemic era and be prepared to predict the world in the future, and better manage their organizations.

KCV Schriftenreihe der FOM, Band1 Essen 2020 ISBN (Print) 978-3-89275-168-7 ISSN (Print) 2701-9403 ISBN (eBook) 978-3-89275-169-4 ISSN (eBook) 2701-9411 Dieses Werk wird herausgegeben vom KCV KompetenzCentrum für angewandte Volkswirtschaftslehre

El presente trabajo propone la identificación de los factores que tienen efecto en la demanda de entradas al fútbol de primera división para el período comprendido entre agosto de 2006 y diciembre de 2016. Se trabaja con un panel de datos para todos los partidos comprendidos en el período, tomando como base el trabajo de García y Rodríguez (2002). Se plantean cuatro estimaciones: un modelo lineal estimado por MCO, un modelo de Between Effects, uno con Efectos Fijos y finalmente uno con Efectos Aleatorios; llegando a la conclusión a través de un test de Hausman que el modelo de efectos fijos es el único consistente. Se observa que, dentro de las variables económicas, la tasa de desempleo y el ingreso medio de los hogares tienen un efecto negativo sobre las entradas vendidas, marcando así la calidad de bien inferior del fútbol en los estadios uruguayos. La única variable deportiva con efecto significativo es la cantidad de victorias que acumule el local en los tres partidos previos al encuentro observado. Otros factores como el clima y las posiciones de los equipos también tienen efecto sobre la venta de entradas.

The sudden rise of coronavirus in the world had various effects on the sports industry. Nevertheless, sports organizations around the world adopted new and different methods to manage the crisis, which in turn, enriched global knowledge of sports management. Also, some industries changed their products and adapted their structure and performance according to the new situation. The new Experiences gained during the pandemic showed that sports organizations need crisis management programs to deal with crises in the future. So, it's necessary to manage sports organizations with a different perspective and new plans to encounter future needs and problems. To do this, sports managers must learn from the experiences of the pandemic era and be prepared to predict the world in the future, and better manage their organizations.

Paper presented at the Annual conference of ASMCF, held at the Université de Paris XIII, Villetaneuse, 4–6 September 2003. It owes much to the research for Chapter 3 of my book Football in France. A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2003), entitled ‘Towns and cities: a
socio-economic geography of French football clubs’.
See http://www.frenchlinks.co.uk/footpage.html.

This paper analyzes the pattern of player substitutions during a soccer match, using data from the First Division (Primera División) of the Spanish National Soccer League in the 2004-2005 season. To do so, an inverse Gaussian hazard model is adopted to analyze the first substitutions of each team that take place at half-time and in the second half of matches. The results show that the most important factor is the score as it stands prior to the time of the player substitution. Furthermore, defensive substitutions are made later in the match than offensive substitutions. We also find some evidence that the home team makes more substitutions than the visiting team in the halftime interval.

Several authors have recently suggested that an expanding labor pool has led to improvement in professional sports leagues’ competitive balance. The basic premise is that a rise in team player options leads to less variability in player performance and therefore increased competition. The present work examines the initial step (i.e., the relationship between the influx of foreign-born players and various measures of talent compression). The results suggest that the geographic diversity of today’s baseball players has reduced variability in individual player performance.

The conference and divisional system has long been a staple part of tournament design in the major pro-sports leagues of North America. This popular but highly rigid system determines on how many occasions all bilateral pairings of teams play each other during the season. Despite the virtues of this system, it necessitates removing the biases it generates in the set of win ratios from the regular season standings prior to calculating within-season measures of competitive balance. This article applies a modified version of a recent model, an extension that is generalizable to any unbalanced schedule design in professional sports leagues worldwide, to correct for this inherent bias for the NFL over the seasons 2002-2011, the results of which suggest the NFL is even more competitively balanced than thought previously.

The sudden rise of coronavirus in the world had various effects on the sports industry. Nevertheless, sports organizations around the world adopted new and different methods to manage the crisis, which in turn, enriched global knowledge of sports management. Also, some industries changed their products and adapted their structure and performance according to the new situation. The new Experiences gained during the pandemic showed that sports organizations need crisis management programs to deal with crises in the future. So, it's necessary to manage sports organizations with a different perspective and new plans to encounter future needs and problems. To do this, sports managers must learn from the experiences of the pandemic era and be prepared to predict the world in the future, and better manage their organizations.

Im November 2018 berichteten Medien erneut über Pläne der europäischen Fußball-Topclubs, eine unabhängige „Eliteliga“ (häufig European Super League oder ESL genannt) gründen zu wollen. Mit der damit neu aufgeflammten Diskussion um die ESL sind verschiedene sportökonomische Fragestellungen verbunden. Dieser Beitrag soll zunächst beleuchten, dass die Überlegungen zur Gründung einer ESL aus sportökonomischer Sicht nicht überraschen können, sondern sich dieser Trend für die Ligenorganisation in Europa schon lange abzeichnet. In einem zweiten Teil werden verschiedenen Szenarien vorgestellt, die als mögliche Varianten der ESL für den europäischen Fußball gegenwärtig diskutiert werden. In der anschließenden Analyse der Ergebnisse wird gezeigt, dass keines dieser Szenarien eine dauerhafte Lösung für die sport- und wettbewerbsökonomischen Probleme, vor denen der europäische Fußball steht, darstellt. Dieser Annahme folgend werden weitere Lösungsmöglichkeiten für die Organisation des europäischen Ligenfußballs vorgeschlagen.

Since its creation in 1903, the Tour de France has remained the biggest of all professional cycling events. This chapter aims to present three aspects of the economic history of the Tour de France and what they tell us about the economic history of sport. First, the Tour has always been owned by private newspaper and media companies. This is why I analyze the level and composition of these companies’ turnover, their business strategies and the reasons for their overall success. Second, Tour riders have always been professionals. This is why I analyze riders’ incomes and prize money and their distribution, which shows clear “winner-takes-all” aspects. Third, the demand for sport shows by Tour spectators reveals broad trends in Europe’s economic history since the early 20th century: the diffusion of bicycles, newspapers and mass consumption, the increase in leisure time, and the advent of the mass media.

Sloboda, vrátane slobody združovania ani v prostredí športu za posledných viac ako 150 rokov nebola a ani nemôže byť absolútna, čo podporujú i texty mnohých v štúdii citovaných dobových akademických prác najmä vysokoškolských študentov. Špeciálne je tomu tak najmä v tzv. národných športových zväzoch, ktoré síce majú práv- nu formu občianskych združení, no nachádzajú sa na pomedzí verejnej správy a združo- vacieho práva. Kde má v nich (s)končiť tzv. sloboda združovania pre autonómiu športu deklarovanú i čl. 165 Zmluvy o fungovaní Európskej únie a začínať ingerencia štátu aj z dôvodu rozsiahleho financovania národných športových zväzov v Slovenskej repub- like z rozpočtu verejnej správy i tzv. príspevkom uznanému športu, na ktorý majú od 1.1.2016 dokonca právny nárok? Ako nový zákon o športe schválený 132 poslancami NR SR zo 135 prítomných zo 150 celkovo mení po 1.1.2016 život a slobodu združova- nia v roku 2019 v 68 národných športových zväzoch rozvíjajúcich 722 uznaných športov a v tisíckach ich členov – v športových kluboch či ďalších asi 35 štátom zatiaľ neuznaných športoch a ich združeniach z celkovo 56 818 občianskych združení v evidencii MV SR v Slovenskej republike k začiatku apríla 2019? / Freedom and also free right to associate even in the environment of sport has not been and cannot be absolute for the last 150 years what is supported also by texts in this study mentioned academic thesis of especially university students of that time. It is especially in the so-called National Sports Associations, which have the legal form of civil associations but are on the border of public administration and free right to as- sociate. Where should end the freedom of association because of the autonomy of sport declared also by the Article 165 of Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the state intervention should begin also due to the extensive financing of National Sports Associations in the Slovak Republic from the public finances thanks special Contribution to Recognized Sport, to which they have even a legal claim since 1.1.2016 ? How does the new Sport Act in the Slovak Republic approved by 132 out of 135 presented and 150 of all members of Slovak Parliament change life and freedom of association in 68 National Sports Associations developing 72 by state recognized sports activity after 1 January 2016 a their thousands of members- sports club out of all 56 818 associations in the evidence of Ministry of Interior of the Slovak Republic in April 2019 with other around 35 not yet state recognized sports activities and their associations?

Al analizar los Juegos Olímpicos de verano desde la disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales, Carlos Pulleiro busca desentrañar las motivaciones político-económicas detrás del comportamiento deportivo de los Estados. Y es que el Olimpismo moderno desde su recuperación a finales del siglo XIX nunca fue ajeno a los acontecimientos políticos, planteándose el internacionalismo y la democratización a través del deporte como instrumentos para aplacar la conflictividad internacional.

Pero frente a este interés deportivo, la agenda político-económica de los Estados también está presente en los Juegos Olímpicos. La llegada de la Guerra Fría y la bipolaridad en torno a la Unión Soviética y Estados Unidos estableció especialmente a los Juegos Olímpicos como un medio al servicio del interés político, económico e ideológico de los Estados, fragmentando el mundo del deporte como nunca antes.

Teams in major sporting leagues primarily obtain amateur players through an annual draft. One of the principal drafting systems in use is the reverse-order draft, whereby poor performing teams have an opportunity to obtain the perceived best young players available. The apparent ability to improve competitive balance has led several professional sporting leagues, including the AFL, NBA, NFL and MLB, to adopt reverse-order drafts, or variants. Unfortunately, reverse-order drafts also create incentives for teams to deliberately under-perform (tank) due to the potential long-term gain from obtaining quality players at higher draft picks. Tanking -whether real or imagined -is a major concern for the integrity of sporting leagues and many leagues, such as the NBA, have a long history of adopting strategies to reduce tanking. However, methods to quantify the ability of alternative draft systems to reduce incentives to tank have not been available to sporting managers. This paper describes a dynamic, non-equilibrium simulation model that captures key components of a sporting league, including the amateur draft, player and team productivity, draft player choice uncertainty, and between-team competition. The model is used to explore how competitive balance and incentives to under-perform vary under alternative draft systems, such as reverse-order drafts, weighted drafts and draft lotteries. Results conclude that reverse-order drafts create the largest incentive to tank of all draft systems considered, but that this incentive is influenced by the ability of clubs to forecast quality players in the draft. The paper illustrates how models of this kind can be used to test alternative draft systems and shows that combinations of alternative draft systems may provide an acceptable compromise between reducing incentives to tank and improved measures of competitive balance.

In the past decade India has become the financing hub for cricket, a broadcaster in its own right, and an agenda-setter in the management of all forms of the game. What some commentators have called the ‘Indianization’ of cricket extends beyond business: it is a social, political, and cultural phenomenon. For five seasons, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has offered a glimpse of this phenomenon, prompting enthusiasm from young fans and those who stand to profit from the new league, and resistance from traditionalists. This paper discusses the material and symbolic roles the IPL has come to play in global cricket. It begins with an overview of the IPL’s history, discusses how the IPL is changing the global business of cricket, and explores how the IPL is challenging the traditional culture of the sport. The paper concludes with arguments about the IPL as a grand spectacle, and a cultural phenomenon that, despite its problems, might prove its critics wrong. Throughout, the paper treats the IPL as a useful case study not only in the business of sports, but also more widely in our theoretical and empirical studies of globalization.

Adidas and Nike currently control 74% of the global football market, a prime example of duopoly. Their share is predicted to increase; consequently, it is crucially important for consumers to assess whether such a duopolistic setting is beneficial for them. In particular, London hosts the greatest number of footballers in the UK, and is a key playing field for the two firms. Thus, this essay investigates: ‘to what extent is a duopoly in the football industry in London beneficial to consumers?’

Firstly, the paper assesses how price in duopoly would change if we transitioned from duopoly, to monopolistic competition. The aim was to assess consumers’ monetary welfare. Secondly, it explores how the market structure influences quality. It uses research from world leading economists to argue that a duopolistic market leads to the highest R&D industry-wide. Thirdly, it analyses a 203-responses survey, which was conducted at football clubs in London to understand how much customers were willing to spend for a given level of R&D. The aim was to see whether a duopoly would have been consistent with their desired combination of price and quality. That way, we could judge whether deviating from duopoly would have benefited them. This analysis was complemented by an interview with a high-profile executive at Adidas.

The investigation finds that monopolistic competition would be more beneficial than duopoly in terms of price, as these would fall with more competition. However, it also reveals that duopoly is more beneficial than any other type of market structure in terms of quality, because of the higher amount of R&D. The analysis of consumer preferences ultimately proves that customers find the duopoly to be the most beneficial type of market structure in the football industry in London.

The sudden rise of coronavirus in the world had various effects on the sports industry. Nevertheless, sports organizations around the world adopted new and different methods to manage the crisis, which in turn, enriched global knowledge of sports management. Also, some industries changed their products and adapted their structure and performance according to the new situation. The new Experiences gained during the pandemic showed that sports organizations need crisis management programs to deal with crises in the future. So, it's necessary to manage sports organizations with a different perspective and new plans to encounter future needs and problems. To do this, sports managers must learn from the experiences of the pandemic era and be prepared to predict the world in the future, and better manage their organizations.

This study presents some results for household demand for sports in Norway. The results provide a firm basis for concluding that the demand for sports is income elastic. However, because both sports events and own sports activities are time-consuming, they may be subject to Linder’s disease, which is due to a shadow value of leisure increasing with income. This implies a negative bias in the income elasticity as estimated by us. The calculations suggest that the bias has become bigger in the period analyzed, that is, Linder’s disease has become more serious for sports over time.

Corruption in general and doping in particular are ubiquitous in both amateur and professional sports and have taken the character of a systemic threat. In creating unfair advantages, doping distorts the level playing field in sporting competition. With higher stakes involved, such distortions create negative externalities not only on the individual level (e.g. lasting health damages) but also frictions on the aggregate level (e.g. loss of media interest) and erode the principle of sports. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive literature overview of the individual drivers to dope, the concomitant detrimental effects and respective countermeasures. In explaining the athletes motivation to use performance enhancing drugs, we enrich the discussion by adapting insights from behavioral economics. These insights help to understand such an athletes decision beyond a clear-cut rationale but rather as a product of the interaction with the underlying environment. We stress that in order to ensure clean sports and fair competition, more sophisticated measurement methods have to be evolved and the respective data made publicly available in order to facilitate more extensive studies in the future. So far, the lack of data is alarming, especially in the area of elite sports where the stakes are high and doping has a substantial influence.