By Robbie Butler

Wishing all our readers a very happy, peaceful Christmas and best wishes for 2026. The picture above was taken last Tuesday (16th of December) on the University College Cork Quad.

2025 proved to be one of our most productive years to date. Eight papers were accepted or published during the year across football, GAA, grehound racing and boxing. The full list is below for those that wish to read further. 

1. An Exploration of English Premier League YouTube Highlights Consumption: Unexpected Outcomes & Schadenfreude. (2026) European Sport Management Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1080/16184742.2025.2578530.
2. Butler, D., Butler, R. and Singleton, C. (2026). Objective Calls under the Spotlight: Referee Consistency and Behaviour on Football’s Biggest Stage. Journal of Sports Economics. https://doi.org/10.1177/15270025251396508.
3. Butler, R., Butler, D. and Gaine, B. (2026). Folk Beliefs and Fast Thinking: An Empirical Test of the Coffin Trap in Greyhound Racing. Review of Behavioral Economics.
4. Butler, R. (2025). An Introduction to the James Quirk Special Issue and the Economics of Combat Sport. Journal of Sports Economics 26(2), 135-138. https://doi.org/10.1177/15270025221112843.
5. Butler, D., Butler R., and Maxcy, J. and Woodworth, S.  (2025). Outcome Uncertainty and Viewer Demand for Basic Cable Boxing. Journal of Sports Economics 26(2), 196-213. https://doi.org/10.1177/15270025231156052.
6. Eakins, J., Considine, J., Collins, N., Horgan, P., & Weir, C. (2025). Sequential Decisions and Compensatory Tendencies: Evidence from Camogie. The Economic and Social Review, 56(3, Autumn), 341-361.
7. Butler, D., & Butler, R. (2025). The Baby Club: Paternity and Performance in a High‐Pressure Setting. Kyklos, 78(2), 510-524. https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.12429.
8. McCarthy, C., Bradfield, T., Butler, D., & Butler, R. (2025). Emissions from air travel and major football tournaments. European Sport Management Quarterly, 25(4), 663-683. https://doi.org/10.1080/16184742.2024.2416891.

The blog will return on the 28th of January 2026 for it's 14th year. 

My guess is that most economists would have heard of Kenneth Arrow and have some idea of the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.  For example, he is known for showing the difficulty combining individual attributes into a common measure (apologies for the generality).  My guess is that fewer would know that Arrow was influenced by a paper by a Harvard mathematician with a keen interest in cross-country running.  Gordon Tullock has documented how Arrow acknowledges the influence of E.V. Huntington's 1938 paper "A Paradox in the Scoring of Competing Teams".

Today, while looking for an excuse to take a break from grading students' work, I read this very short paper again.  It is two pages in length.  Huntington opens the paper with a brief discussion of scoring teams of students and cross-country runners.  Because individual times were not usually available, the scoring of the running teams has to be done by the rank method.  By contrast, the student marks can be aggregated directly.  Huntington then presents six cases where teams, comprising of three students per team, are scored using the aggregation of their marks and the ranking method.  In all six cases, Team A scores 268, Team B scores 267, and Team C scores 266.  However, the rank method give six different rankings: ABC; ACB; BAC; BCA; CAB; CBA.

There is a touch of understated class about the following two lines from Huntington.  "In many practical cases it will make no difference which method is used.  Nevertheless, the question has a certain theoretical interest which seems to be worth discussing."

In these couple of seconds from yesterday's game between Brentford and Leeds United both managers raise their hands into the air.  If they were not taking part in a Mexican Wave then what prompted a similar reaction from the opposing managers.  Were they reacting to the same event in the same way?  Or, maybe, one manager was reacting to a challenge by a player from the opposing team and the other manager was reacting to the decision of the referee to award a free.  We don't know but we are more likely to think it is the second explanation because we start with the belief that they are unlikely to agree.

A seminal paper in the area is over 70 years old.  It is called "They Saw A Game". The game was a robust 1951 football game between Dartmouth and Princeton.  When the authors solicited the views of the respective student supporters, they discovered that the students saw the game differently.  My guess is that a survey of supporters of Brentford and Leeds United would also disagree on a share of referee decisions from yesterday.  Therefore, I would question the research that measures referee-error using fan websites.

Over the last 24 hours an amount of Irish media outlets reported the comments of swimmer Daniel Wiffen about the Enhanced Games, e.g. "For me, it's not swimming".  My guess is that "swimming" for Wiffen is more than specific movements of a body in liquid.  I would guess that he means that it is more than having a level playing field (a poor image for a water sport) because there is the opportunity for all swimmers in the Enhanced Games to be on the same substance.  Maybe we need to clearly define what we are seeking to discover when we run a competition (borrowing from a title of a famous Hayek article).  Is it is how fast a human body can "naturally" cover a distance in water?  But this begs the question as to what we mean by "natural". 

We should keep an open mind and repeatedly ask what are we measuring.  We might think we are measuring X when it might turn out we are measuring Z.  In his experiments, Walter Michel started out trying to establish what strategies kids used to combat the pull of instant gratification.  Offered a choice between one oreo (marshmallow) immediately or two when the experimenter returned, Michel observed the kids.  Years later, Michel decided to see how his subjects were getting along with their lives.  He discovered that those who were better at combatting the pull of instant gratification did better academically and in their careers.  After the passage of another period of time, Michel returned again to the issue.  Was there a potential cause outside the individuals themselves?  He found that the kids who did better where those with wealthier parents.  It can be difficult to devise a competition that measures exactly what one wishes to measure.  How many poor kids don't get the opportunity to compete in various sports because of their poverty?

Tonight Newcastle United play in the UEFA Champions League.  Some of their fans are not too pleased about the limits on "financial doping" due to rules such as the UK's version of Financial Fair Play.  There is probably a grain of truth in the view that these rules are designed to keep poorer clubs from transforming themselves with the help of a "sugar daddy".  The club picked a wealthy parent but are constrained in their use the owner's wealth.

In "Competition as a Discovery Procedure", Hayek mentioned sporting and academic competitions.  Many of the "governing bodies" for academic competitions are worried about "unnatural" influences, i.e. the use of artificial intelligence.  Academic doping.  Enhanced intelligence.  Objectors raise issues not dissimilar to financial doping or chemical doping in sport.  But where does one draw the line.  Students from wealthier backgrounds can afford private tuition ("grinds") or go to better institutions.  Maybe AI levels the playing field.  It brings us back to the question "what are we trying to measure when we are using a competition as a discovery procedure?"