Sports Economics Review最新文献

We investigate the presence of nationality salary premia in two top European football leagues (the Premier League and Serie A). We uncover a substantial pay premium for South American players (primarily driven by Argentina and Brazil) of between 11 and 15 per cent in magnitude. We investigate possible mechanisms, such as whether these salary effects are driven by new entrants to the league, and whether they are reflected in team attendances and team performance. Fans appear to respond to higher proportions of South American players in England, but not in Italy. We discuss the implications of these results and suggest why potential differences might exist across the leagues.

We present a game-theoretic model of baseball as a two-by-two normal-form game between pitchers and batters, where batters decide whether to swing or hold, and pitchers choose whether to throw inside or outside the strike zone. We use machine learning to label pitches that have not been swung at. Our approach enables testing of the predictions derived from the Minimax Theorem for both players. The hypotheses of equality of payoffs across actions and the absence of serial correlation hold for the majority of players. Batters exhibit lower swing rates than theoretical predictions, while pitchers tend to throw inside the strike zone more frequently than expected.

Does success breed success? Psychological momentum theory suggests that past achievements might influence future performance. However, distinguishing between psychological and strategic momentum — where a player's effort shifts based on relative position — is challenging. In this paper, using a novel dataset from professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive matches, I focus on technical timeouts. These timeouts don't affect player position but may disrupt psychological momentum. I find that a winning [losing] team with significant momentum sees a 13 [11.7] percentage points increased chance of losing [winning] the following round after calling for such a timeout. This shows that psychological momentum significantly affects performance and that timeouts can reset the momentum.

Economic agents react to incentives, and this holds true for professional football teams as well. Double round-robin and single-match elimination represent two opposite competition regimes, with incentives varying distinctly between them. At the level of individual matches, a single defeat needs not be fatal under a double round-robin regime, unlike in a single-match elimination system. Utilizing data from Dutch professional football from the 2004/05 season to the 2022/23 season, we compare single-match elimination Cup matches with double round-robin league matches, focusing on stadium attendance, match results, and home advantage. Stadium attendance tends to be lower in Cup matches, although the gap narrows in later stages of the Cup tournament, and it eventually disappears. The home advantage is similar in Cup matches and league matches, but when Cup matches extend beyond regular time, the home advantage diminishes. In later stages of the Cup tournament, both during extra time and penalty shootouts, home advantage appears to be virtually absent.

The transfer market for sports players is analyzed using a contest theory approach. A sports team exerts two types of effort in order to attract a player: productive effort, for which the team incurs a cost only if the player signs a contract with them; and persuading effort, for which the team incurs a cost regardless. The findings describe the conditions under which there will be no persuading effort, as well as the impact of persuading effort on productive effort and the contestant's utility.

What constitutes competitive balance is a contentious issue in professional sports. We contribute to this debate with a simple framework encapsulating multiple viewpoints of competitive balance and highlight how this framework suggests that there could be an inherent tradeoff along two common dimensions. Using the framework as a lens for comparing North American professional sports leagues, we then demonstrate how important changes over time in the collective bargaining process have influenced the competitive balance of these leagues in different ways. Finally, we discuss and provide descriptive evidence for the influence of differences in non-gate revenue growth across leagues and how it might have affected their competitive balance in recent years. (JEL L83, D63, C23).

Previous research shows that mood-altering events, such as sports results, elections outcomes and natural disasters, impact fertility, crime rate, and investor behaviour. In this paper, we use recent Canadian Birth Statistics and the National Hockey League (NHL) results to examine the link between sports events and short-term fertility spikes. In addition, using betting odds, we differentiate among unexpected wins, unexpected losses, and expected outcomes, as a test for the relevance of the Prospect Theory to this context. Our dataset is a daily panel, following all the seven Canadian Census Metropolitan Areas with a team in the NHL, from 2008 to 2019. In our panel fixed effects estimations, we account for the day of the week and all statutory federal and provincial holidays of Canada. In the estimations with raw NHL results, the coefficients of interest ultimately lose their statistical significance. In the specifications accounting for expectations, we find a statistically significant association with fertility for unexpected wins, and statistically insignificant coefficients for unexpected losses as well as expected NHL outcomes. In light of the results, we propose the greater likelihood of pre-game social gatherings on sports nights and celebratory sex after the euphoria of an unexpected win, as the possible channels of impact.

We study the “groups of three” tournament format which was planned to be implemented in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Finally, FIFA resigned from the format because its implementation is highly likely to lead to collusion (match-fixing). In our paper, we show that some modifications to this format may significantly reduce the risk of collusion. Such a reduction can be achieved by the following two innovative changes: random tie-breaking based on the goal-difference along with dynamic scheduling. Our Monte Carlo simulations show that the expected number of matches with high risk of collusion is reduced from 5.5 in the FIFA's initial proposal to 0.26 in our proposed design.