Pub Date : 2026-01-13DOI: 10.1016/j.serev.2026.100066
Gustavo Bergantiños , Juan D. Moreno-Ternero
Sports are one of the most significant products of the entertainment industry, accounting for a large portion of all television (and even platform) viewing. Consequently, the sale of broadcasting and media rights is the most important source of revenue for professional sports clubs. We survey the economic literature dealing with this issue, with a special emphasis on the crucial problem that arises with the allocation of revenues when they are raised from the collective sale of broadcasting rights.
{"title":"The economics of sportscast revenue sharing","authors":"Gustavo Bergantiños , Juan D. Moreno-Ternero","doi":"10.1016/j.serev.2026.100066","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.serev.2026.100066","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Sports are one of the most significant products of the entertainment industry, accounting for a large portion of all television (and even platform) viewing. Consequently, the sale of broadcasting and media rights is the most important source of revenue for professional sports clubs. We survey the economic literature dealing with this issue, with a special emphasis on the crucial problem that arises with the allocation of revenues when they are raised from the collective sale of broadcasting rights.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101182,"journal":{"name":"Sports Economics Review","volume":"13 ","pages":"Article 100066"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146102930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/j.serev.2025.100064
Marco Henriques Pereira , Markus Lang
Understanding why some sports clubs consistently outperform others despite similar financial resources remains a central question in sports economics. This paper develops a contest-theoretic model of a sports league in which clubs differ in both their financial capacity and their efficiency in transforming player talent into on-field performance. Each club chooses its optimal level of talent investment under either profit-maximizing or win-maximizing objectives. The model explicitly distinguishes between two types of heterogeneity-market size and efficiency, allowing us to study how these asymmetries jointly shape equilibrium talent demand, competitive balance, and welfare. The results reveal that profit-maximizing clubs may reduce talent investment when efficiency improves, while win-maximizing clubs respond in the opposite direction. Efficiency differences also affect large and small clubs asymmetrically, with small clubs often expanding investment under conditions in which large clubs contract. Welfare implications depend critically on league orientation: in profit-oriented leagues, welfare improves when small clubs are less efficient and large clubs are more efficient, whereas the opposite holds in win-oriented leagues. By integrating contest theory with the literature on club efficiency, the paper demonstrates that efficiency heterogeneity is not inherently detrimental. Under certain conditions, it can yield strategic advantages and even enhance league welfare, offering new insights for both academic research and league policy.
{"title":"Transforming talent into performance: Efficiency heterogeneity, strategic behavior, and welfare in sports leagues","authors":"Marco Henriques Pereira , Markus Lang","doi":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100064","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100064","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Understanding why some sports clubs consistently outperform others despite similar financial resources remains a central question in sports economics. This paper develops a contest-theoretic model of a sports league in which clubs differ in both their financial capacity and their efficiency in transforming player talent into on-field performance. Each club chooses its optimal level of talent investment under either profit-maximizing or win-maximizing objectives. The model explicitly distinguishes between two types of heterogeneity-market size and efficiency, allowing us to study how these asymmetries jointly shape equilibrium talent demand, competitive balance, and welfare. The results reveal that profit-maximizing clubs may reduce talent investment when efficiency improves, while win-maximizing clubs respond in the opposite direction. Efficiency differences also affect large and small clubs asymmetrically, with small clubs often expanding investment under conditions in which large clubs contract. Welfare implications depend critically on league orientation: in profit-oriented leagues, welfare improves when small clubs are less efficient and large clubs are more efficient, whereas the opposite holds in win-oriented leagues. By integrating contest theory with the literature on club efficiency, the paper demonstrates that efficiency heterogeneity is not inherently detrimental. Under certain conditions, it can yield strategic advantages and even enhance league welfare, offering new insights for both academic research and league policy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101182,"journal":{"name":"Sports Economics Review","volume":"12 ","pages":"Article 100064"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145624077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-08DOI: 10.1016/j.serev.2025.100061
Kjetil K. Haugen , Andrew Musau
This paper examines the role of compensatory and subjective scoring elements in determining competition outcomes in ski jumping. Using detailed data from seven seasons of men’s World Cup events (2010/11-2016/17), we decompose final scores into their constituent components: jump distance, style points awarded by judges, wind compensation, and gate compensation. We then simulate alternative ranking systems that exclude one or more components to assess how much they matter for event- and season-level standings. Our results show that jump distance alone explains most of the variation in rankings, and that removing style, wind, or gate points individually leads to only modest statistical changes in aggregate correlations. However, even small positional shifts - often one or two places - can be decisive for professional athletes, affecting prize money, sponsorships, and career trajectories. The findings illustrate a central tension in the design of scoring systems: subjective and compensatory elements may appear marginal in statistical terms but can have substantial consequences for individuals and for perceptions of fairness. By situating ski jumping in the broader economics literature on contests, subjective evaluation, and institutional design, we highlight how this case sheds light on the trade-offs between transparency, fairness adjustments, and competitive incentives in performance evaluation systems.
{"title":"Do subjective and compensatory scores matter? an empirical analysis of Ski jumping competitions","authors":"Kjetil K. Haugen , Andrew Musau","doi":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100061","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100061","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the role of compensatory and subjective scoring elements in determining competition outcomes in ski jumping. Using detailed data from seven seasons of men’s World Cup events (2010/11-2016/17), we decompose final scores into their constituent components: jump distance, style points awarded by judges, wind compensation, and gate compensation. We then simulate alternative ranking systems that exclude one or more components to assess how much they matter for event- and season-level standings. Our results show that jump distance alone explains most of the variation in rankings, and that removing style, wind, or gate points individually leads to only modest statistical changes in aggregate correlations. However, even small positional shifts - often one or two places - can be decisive for professional athletes, affecting prize money, sponsorships, and career trajectories. The findings illustrate a central tension in the design of scoring systems: subjective and compensatory elements may appear marginal in statistical terms but can have substantial consequences for individuals and for perceptions of fairness. By situating ski jumping in the broader economics literature on contests, subjective evaluation, and institutional design, we highlight how this case sheds light on the trade-offs between transparency, fairness adjustments, and competitive incentives in performance evaluation systems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101182,"journal":{"name":"Sports Economics Review","volume":"12 ","pages":"Article 100061"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145529063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-25DOI: 10.1016/j.serev.2025.100060
Jiang Jin , Di Yang , Yaokai Liu , Lihua He
This paper investigates the influence of foreign players on the performance of domestic players in the Chinese Basketball Association. During the 2019–2020 season, the COVID-19 outbreak disrupted player availability, as some foreign players were unable to return to their teams. This unexpected situation created an exogenous shift in team composition, offering a unique natural experiment to study this dynamic. Our findings reveal that the performance of domestic players, measured by plus-minus values, significantly improved in the absence of foreign players. This result holds across a range of robustness checks. Furthermore, we find that the absence of foreign players led to an improvement in domestic players’ field goal percentage and points per minute. A mechanism analysis, conducted from two perspectives—through Two-Stage Least Squares estimation and by focusing on players whose positions directly overlapped with foreign players—suggests that the increased playing time caused by the absence of foreign players is the primary driver behind the enhanced on-court performance of domestic players.
{"title":"The impact of foreign player absence on domestic player performance: A COVID-19 natural experiment","authors":"Jiang Jin , Di Yang , Yaokai Liu , Lihua He","doi":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100060","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100060","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper investigates the influence of foreign players on the performance of domestic players in the Chinese Basketball Association. During the 2019–2020 season, the COVID-19 outbreak disrupted player availability, as some foreign players were unable to return to their teams. This unexpected situation created an exogenous shift in team composition, offering a unique natural experiment to study this dynamic. Our findings reveal that the performance of domestic players, measured by plus-minus values, significantly improved in the absence of foreign players. This result holds across a range of robustness checks. Furthermore, we find that the absence of foreign players led to an improvement in domestic players’ field goal percentage and points per minute. A mechanism analysis, conducted from two perspectives—through Two-Stage Least Squares estimation and by focusing on players whose positions directly overlapped with foreign players—suggests that the increased playing time caused by the absence of foreign players is the primary driver behind the enhanced on-court performance of domestic players.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101182,"journal":{"name":"Sports Economics Review","volume":"12 ","pages":"Article 100060"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145374571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.serev.2025.100055
Rodney Fort , Finn McMichael , Randal R. Rucker
We derive three propositions describing what we coin “the idea of WAR” from published and online sources—replacement wins, unit contribution, and comparability across position, team, and time. Using a team win production regression model incorporating the three propositions, team-level data from Baseball-Reference (BR-WAR) and FanGraphs (FG-WAR) reject replacement wins and comparability. The unit contribution proposition is rejected for pitcher BR-WAR but not hitter BR-WAR, while the opposite is true for FG-WAR. Hitter and pitcher WAR contributions to wins are not equal to each other for either version of WAR. Finally, the contribution of pitcher FG-WAR to wins exhibits diminishing returns. While our results reject that these two measures adhere completely to the idea of WAR, they do not reject either one as useful measures of player performance. These results are important for sports analytics, the economic estimation of wins production, and a recent Major League Baseball salary arbitration issue.
{"title":"Do team-level calculations support “the idea of WAR”? Implications for Wins production estimation in baseball","authors":"Rodney Fort , Finn McMichael , Randal R. Rucker","doi":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100055","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100055","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We derive three propositions describing what we coin “the idea of WAR” from published and online sources—replacement wins, unit contribution, and comparability across position, team, and time. Using a team win production regression model incorporating the three propositions, team-level data from Baseball-Reference (BR-WAR) and FanGraphs (FG-WAR) reject replacement wins and comparability. The unit contribution proposition is rejected for pitcher BR-WAR but not hitter BR-WAR, while the opposite is true for FG-WAR. Hitter and pitcher WAR contributions to wins are not equal to each other for either version of WAR. Finally, the contribution of pitcher FG-WAR to wins exhibits diminishing returns. While our results reject that these two measures adhere completely to the idea of WAR, they do not reject either one as useful measures of player performance. These results are important for sports analytics, the economic estimation of wins production, and a recent Major League Baseball salary arbitration issue.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101182,"journal":{"name":"Sports Economics Review","volume":"11 ","pages":"Article 100055"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145049868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.serev.2025.100056
Luís Cabral , Shucheng Liao
Is access to the UEFA Champions League based on sporting merit? We test whether a marginally excluded team from domestic league is expected to perform better than a marginally included team from domestic league . Using past performance as a predictor of future performance, our answer is a resounding yes. We compute the counterfactual of an access rule based on sporting merit and show that the vast majority of slots would be allocated to top European leagues.
{"title":"Is the UEFA champions league fair?","authors":"Luís Cabral , Shucheng Liao","doi":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100056","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100056","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Is access to the UEFA Champions League based on sporting merit? We test whether a marginally excluded team from domestic league <span><math><mi>i</mi></math></span> is expected to perform better than a marginally included team from domestic league <span><math><mi>j</mi></math></span>. Using past performance as a predictor of future performance, our answer is a resounding yes. We compute the counterfactual of an access rule based on sporting merit and show that the vast majority of slots would be allocated to top European leagues.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101182,"journal":{"name":"Sports Economics Review","volume":"11 ","pages":"Article 100056"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145049870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.serev.2025.100058
{"title":"Announcement of inclusion of the Sports Economics Review into Scopus index","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100058","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100058","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":101182,"journal":{"name":"Sports Economics Review","volume":"11 ","pages":"Article 100058"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145020673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-01DOI: 10.1016/j.serev.2025.100053
Jeffrey Cisyk , Pascal Courty , Amin Kouhbor
We examine the impact of match-specific monetary incentives on match outcome and team behavior in the English Premier League. Our findings reveal that higher financial stakes increase the likelihood of a team winning a match while also encouraging more aggressive play: a £1M increase in the expected award from winning a game raises the probability of winning by 1.1 percentage points and results in an expected rise of 0.07 fouls per game. Teams adapt to financial incentives to maximize success in high-stakes games. These results help sports organizations understand the trade-offs in mitigating misconduct while preserving the competitive intensity of the game.
{"title":"Foul Play: The impact of financial incentives on aggression in sports","authors":"Jeffrey Cisyk , Pascal Courty , Amin Kouhbor","doi":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100053","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.serev.2025.100053","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examine the impact of match-specific monetary incentives on match outcome and team behavior in the English Premier League. Our findings reveal that higher financial stakes increase the likelihood of a team winning a match while also encouraging more aggressive play: a £1M increase in the expected award from winning a game raises the probability of winning by 1.1 percentage points and results in an expected rise of 0.07 fouls per game. Teams adapt to financial incentives to maximize success in high-stakes games. These results help sports organizations understand the trade-offs in mitigating misconduct while preserving the competitive intensity of the game.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101182,"journal":{"name":"Sports Economics Review","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100053"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144261765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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