Sports Economics Review最新文献

We define a measure of competitiveness that is based on full rankings and corrects for partitioning of the parties in exogenously defined clusters. We use the measure to study the change in competitiveness of Formula One racing during the period 1993–2019.

This paper demonstrates, by simple classical game theory, that the claim by Savulescu et al. (2004) of a safer and fairer sport with legalized doping is a highly unlikely outcome. This result, with added arguments related to adverse effects on both demand and supply for the sports product, should hopefully affect the debate on legalization of performance-enhancing drugs. The Nash equilibrium obtained in the analysis predicts more doping, and maybe more importantly, use of more dangerous performance-enhancing drugs. As a consequence, a legalization of performance.enhancing drugs may threaten the actual existence of professional sports markets.

We ask if the move to play elite football (soccer) matches without spectators during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted online viewership. Using a new dataset from YouTube, we depart from the traditional ex ante approach to modelling football demand and investigate streaming preferences for known results in football. Our data is collected in real-time and considers English Premier League matches from 2019 to 2021 played both in front of crowds and behind closed doors. The results indicate increased viewership for matches played without crowds. The findings also allow a deeper understanding of direct demand for football as we identify motivators, including different pre-game and in-game characteristics as well as scheduling effects, that make fans curious to view content after the fact. The research adds to our understanding of the effects of the pandemic on fan viewer behaviour and speaks to broadcasting firms developing digital extension strategies.

Injury rates in thirteen U.S. women’s college sports and four U.S. girls’ high school sports are examined in this paper. The sports are categorized as high injury (H) or low injury (L) and differences in injury rates between the two are examined. Estimates are presented of the injury savings that would result if the H sports were changed to have injury rates similar to those in the L sports.

This paper tests the theory of mixed strategy equilibrium using Maradona's penalty kicks during his lifetime professional career. The results are remarkably consistent with equilibrium play in every respect: (i) Maradona's scoring probabilities are statistically identical across strategies; (ii) His choices are serially independent. These results show that Maradona's behavior is consistent with Nash's predictions, specifically with both implications of von Neumann's Minimax Theorem.

European soccer leagues operate on a ”promotion and relegation” system, in which poor-performing teams are moved to a lower division of play, and high-performing teams are moved up. Because of the prestige and television exposure of higher divisions, promotions and relegations have major financial and competitive consequences for clubs. I use a regression discontinuity design to study the consequences of promotion and relegation in Europe’s top soccer leagues, comparing just-relegated teams to just-surviving teams, and the same for promotion. On the field, both relegation and promotion have lasting impacts, with significant effects lasting 3 or more years, and the point estimates suggest even longer effects. The effects of promotion are slightly larger and more persistent. Financially, promotion is worth between $238–280 million over the next 7 years, while relegation costs between $225–262 million.

We study the allocation of revenues raised from the collective sale of broadcasting rights for the Spanish Football League (La Liga), which is strongly regulated by the Spanish government since 2015. The allocation process is decomposed in four dimensions: lower bounds, sport performance, economic performance, and broadcasting performance. For each dimension, we compare the allocation suggested by La Liga with other alternatives grounded on the fair allocation literature. Based on our analysis, we argue that the allocation process implemented by La Liga could be modified in meaningful ways, while still obeying regulation measures.

We study all-pay contests with complete information and two heterogeneous contestants who compete for a single prize. We combine two common designer's goals which are combined especially in sports contests; effort maximization and competitive balance. We focus on two cases when the designer's utility is either continuous or discontinuous in the contestants' efforts. We show that a maximum effort constraint is always efficient for increasing the designer's utility, namely, effort maximization under competitive balance.