I was interviewed by the Economist newspaper last week about trends in pay for star footballers. The article can be read here.
By David Butler
I was interviewed by the Economist newspaper last week about trends in pay for star footballers. The article can be read here. By Robbie Butler
Those readers that are interested in video games may know that the industry is somewhat under pressure. Much is now written about a so-called “crisis” in the sector with little innovation and very few new titles. The industry is not immune to crisis. In 1983 the industry faced a crisis leading to the bankruptcy of some important players. The current problems are not dissimilar. In 2023, the industry experienced large scale layoffs, which affected both established and emerging game development studios, impacting employees, projects, and the overall landscape of the gaming industry. Today it was announced that Football Manager 25 – a mainstay in the annual gaming release schedule – has been cancelled. Those behind the game said, “Due to a variety of challenges that we’ve been open about to date, and many more unforeseen, we currently haven’t achieved what we set out to do in enough areas of the game, despite the phenomenal efforts of our team”. The statement continued “Each decision to delay the release was made with the aim of getting the game closer to the desired level but, as we approached critical milestones at the turn of the year, it became unmistakably clear that we would not achieve the standard required, even with the adjusted timeline. Whilst many areas of the game have hit our targets, the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be. As extensive evaluation has demonstrated, including consumer playtesting, we have clear validation for the new direction of the game and are getting close – however, we’re too far away from the standards you deserve.” I have no idea if the current versions of these games are good. Due to a combination of reasons, I stopped playing – what was then Championship Manager – many years ago. One of the reasons for stopping was due to the sheer complication of the newer titles. As technology improved, the games became a closer representation of reality. I came to the point where the game was so realistic, it was hardly a game at all, and my enjoyment ceased. In my mind at least, these games are about escapism. They are not supposed to be realistic. In my introductory economics lectures I introduce students to economic models. I make it clear that he use of models is widespread in economics. Models have assumptions and, these influence how models operate. They are a representation of reality, not reality itself. We don’t need to model reality. We already have it. If one arrived in a foreign city and needed to get from A to B, they often use a map. A map is nothing like the reality. It is rather a series of lines drawn on paper. Yet it works. If you offer someone a perfect representation of getting from A to B (via a simulator) the problem they have remains. Maybe it is time to make these game simple again. They don’t need to be close to reality in my view. That’s what they are games. By Robbie Butler
The Department of Economics of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) is pleased to invite researchers to submit a paper for the second Latin American Sports Economics Conference (LASEC – 2) to be held in Lima (Perú) on July 17th and 18th, 2025.Submissions are welcome in any area related to sports economics, particularly papers addressing Latin American issues. Both completed works and research in progress are admissible; however, manuscripts already accepted for publication are not eligible. The conference language is English, but we also welcome outstanding research written or presented in Spanish, with translation services available. The conference is thrilled to announce David Forrest (U. Liverpool) and Stefan Szymanski (U. Michigan) as keynote speakers. To participate, please submit the title, authors, corresponding affiliations, and a 500-word abstract outlining the research question, methods, and mainresults by March 1, 2025 to the following link. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by March 28, 2025. The scientific committee is composed of Gabriel Rodriguez (Chair,Economics Department, PUCP), James Reade (U. of Reading), and Jorge Tovar (U. Los Andes). For further information, please contact the conference organizers, JorgeTovar ([email protected]) and José Gallardo ([email protected]), or the conference assistant, Ana Lucía Del Río ([email protected]). By Robbie Butler
I was watching the Ireland-England U20 Six Nations game on television last night and was interested to see the introduction of a new rule in rugby - the 20-minute red card. When this is used a player who receives a red card can be replaced by another player after 20 minutes. This means the team plays with one less player for 20 minutes, but after that period, they can bring on a substitute to restore their full 15-player lineup. The punishment is therefore temporary for the team but permanent for the player. This is interesting because it seeks to distinguish between the individual and the group. A red card after 5 minutes of play is very different to a red card with 5 minutes of play remaining. It got me thinking about the evolution of cards and their use in different field sports. It was not until the 1970 FIFA World Cup in Mexico that red and yellow cards were first used in football. These cards remain the same today. Yellow is a caution, with the player continuing to play. A red card means permanent punishment for both the player and team, with the individual not permitted to play and the team down to one player. The 20-minute red card lies somewhere in the middle of this. Another variant of this can be found in Gaelic Games with the black card. A black card is a disciplinary sanction introduced in 2014 to penalize certain cynical fouls. A player who receives a black card must leave the field but can be replaced by a substitute if available immediately. Therefore, the punishment for the player is permanent but there is no punishment for the team, other than marginal loss of talent between the black carded player and their replacement. Football attempted to trail something like this recently with a blue card. If used, the blue card would temporarily send a player off the field, effectively creating a "sin bin" system. This is identical to the yellow card in rugby, where a player must leave the field of play for 10 minutes before returning. The punishment is therefore temporary for both the player and the team. While rugby has used the current version of the sinbin since the early 2000s, football appears to have abandoned the blue card. What works in rugby, doesn't seem to work in football. Rugby has also successfully used the TMO since 2001. I wish the same could be said of football's VAR. Maybe it is time to send VAR the way of the blue card. ![]() By David Butler Sports stars have a habit of sharing a lot of personal milestones with their fans. Thanks to the multiball system Richarlson could tell the world of his good news after scoring for Tottenham yesterday. A thumb quickly went into his mouth, and a ball beneath his shirt. Others, like Savinho, are even more explicit when it comes to life events – he took to social media over Christmas to announce that his wife Anna was expecting their first child. A few years back Raul Jiminez even claimed that since he found out the news, he’d been scoring more goals. Expectancy in sports is one issue we address in our recent paper published in Kyklos – The Baby Club . While it is not possible to isolate the precise date that the good news for players is received based on the actual date of birth, it is workable to estimate a window when the information arrived. We are not presumptuous on the emotional impact of this news or any expected performance direction. By analysing over 100 births, we find no evidence to support a link between expectancy news and player performance. Sorry, Raul. Our blog will now take its customary Christmas break and return on Monday the 27th of January 2025.
We would like to wish all our readers a very Happy Christmas and best wishes for 2025. By Robbie Butler
We are delighted to announce we have recently been published in Kyklos. Our paper - "The Baby Club: Paternity and Performance in a High-Pressure Setting" - attempts to understand worker performance before and after the birth of a child. Specifically, we look at male footballers and try to assess how child birth effects their performance on the pitch. Our paper offers new insights into fatherhood by asking if the onset of paternity changes workplace productivity. We do this in the well-monitored and high-pressure setting of professional football using a novel dataset that matches 115 birth disclosures to the performance of 96 players. Our empirical approach involves specifying a performance equation for a suite of match-level performance statistics and estimating OLS and Poisson fixed-effect panel regressions. We find a negative correlation between fatherhood and collaborative performance as measured by expected assists—a player's ability to create goalscoring opportunities. We also report negative effects for the perinatal period for expected assists and passing measures. There is no evidence of performance changes resulting from expectancy news. As negative performance effects are observed in a context of ‘superstar wages’, this raises concerns for high-pressure labour markets where workers are remunerated less but have low uptake of leave entitlements or where paternity leave is culturally taboo. The full paper, available in open access, can be found here. By David Butler
This week a new paper of ours was published in Frontiers in Behavioral Economics as part of a Sports Economics special issue co-edited by Raphael Flepp, Romain Gauriot and Carl Singleton. With colleagues Alex Farnell and Rob Simmons, we ask if elite football clubs use advanced performance metrics to pay players? Given the data revolution that has occurred in football over the past years, one is left wondering if, or to what extent, metrics such as expected goals or expected assists etc. are used to determine contract awards. Using data from Capology and Fbref, our take-away message is that clubs are using very few of these advanced statistics in salary negotiations. Based on the results, it seems plausible that executives use individual inputs to team output as a key determining factor in pay - individual aspects of performance may treated as a black box so to speak and adding to team points may be the guiding metric. The full paper can be abstract here and the abstract is below Abstract "Labor economists aspire to understand how workers' productivity impacts pay. While professional football is a well-established domain to explore this relationship, so far, research has relied on basic productivity measures. Football is now awash with advanced and granular performance metrics that can allow a deeper understanding of the pay-performance relationship. We specify a salary model considering the newly available data and use sophisticated performance measures to explain contracted salaries in the English Premier League and Italian Serie A. We make a methodological breakthrough by identifying a sample of players who are in the first year of a new contract only. This results in a much tighter relationship between pay and performance. We estimate different salary equations using both basic and advanced performance statistics. Our main findings are, first, that few of our advanced performance metrics help to explain player salary and, second, that there is misalignment between individual performance determinants of team points and player salaries." By Robbie Butler
It has been interesting to read recently that IFAB, football’s custodians of the laws of the sport, are considering moves “to deal more effectively with goalkeepers who unfairly hold the ball for too long”. This statement appears in the 2024/25 Laws of the Game and seeks to target one of the most unapplied/broken rules, in my opinion, in the game. What is more interesting is that goalkeepers holding the ball is currently covered by Law 12 – Fouls and Misconduct. The rule states that “An indirect free kick is awarded if a goalkeeper, inside their penalty area, commits any of the following offences: controls the ball with the hand/arm for more than six seconds before releasing it”. Anyone that watches football will know this “six second rule”, introduced around 20 years ago (I think) is almost never applied. Prior to the introduction of the rule, goalkeepers would simply hold the ball for long periods of time. The final minutes of the 1992 UEFA European Championship Final between Denmark and Germany are a must-watch for those that want to witness how dreadful this, and the back-pass to the goalkeeper, were prior to important rule changes. Goalkeepers were permitted to take 4 steps with the ball in hand. They would often then drop the ball, before picking it up again, to continue. This loophole was closed, but the steps rule remained. Timing was simply at the referee’s discretion. This changed with the 6-second rule. But does this rule actually matter? I recently watched an English Premier League game and counted to 34 seconds before the goalkeeper, who had caught a cross, decided to release the ball from his hands. The question, for me at least, is why do referee’s ignore this formal rule? Will trialing a new punishment e.g. awarding a corner instead of an indirect free kick, increase application of this rule? Maybe, but why is the current punishment not applied? Another interesting dynamic of this rule is that players rarely seek it’s application. For example, during the 34 seconds that the goalkeeper had the ball in his hands, not a single player visibly appealed for an indirect free kick to be awarded. They were instead happy to wait for the ball to return to play. By Robbie Butler
Our latest effort has just been published in European Sport Management Quarterly. The inspiration for this work has it's origins in a television report I watched back in 2021 - during lockdown - when I learned Welsh football fans had to travel to Baku to watch their countries first two group games, and then travel onto Rome for game 3, before moving to Amsterdam in the Round of 16. A total travel distance of more than 8,000km. The new research explores the environmental impact of air travel during two international football tournaments – the Mens FIFA World Cup and UEFA European Championships – by estimating CO2 emissions from the movements of competing teams. Specifically, we consider how travel associated with major international football tournaments has evolved over time. We access data for 895 international football matches (June 1990–July 2024). Our data focuses on the travel associated with players and management travelling to, and within, host countries and includes the movement of more than 16,000 people. Estimates of CO2 emissions per passenger (per kilometre) are used to examine the environmental impact of travelling to host countries, and competing, during the tournament. Our findings are the first attempt to demonstrate the CO2 emissions from team travel to and within major football tournaments. Despite improvements in aeroplane fuel efficiency, the carbon footprint from team travel has generally not been reduced. The decision to expand these tournaments, locate matches across large geographic areas, and use co-host countries has exacerbated this issue. Our findings can support sustainability initiatives and could be adopted by both federations to curb CO2 emissions which appear to undermine genuine attempts to become more environmentally friendly. The full paper can be found here. |
Archives
February 2025
About
This website was founded in July 2013. Categories
All
|