By Robbie Butler

The 16th (XVI) ESEA Con­fer­ence on Sport Eco­nomics will be held in Innsbruck, Austria from the 27th to 29th August 2025.

The deadline for abstract submission has been extended until the end of March. Those wishing to submit can find more infomation at here.

The key dates are as follows:

• 31 March 2025 – EXTENDED Deadline for abstract submissions
  
• 30 April 2025 – Notification of acceptance 
  
• 31 May – Deadline for registration for presenting authors and PhD workshop (Early Bird)
  
• 1 July 2025– Deadline for the submission of full papers: Best Young Researcher Paper Award (BYRPA)
  
• 25-27 August 2025– PhD workshop
  
• 27-29 August 2025 – ESEA conference (AGM on 28 August)

By David Butler

Following on from my last post, another way to consider the elite standards of the top European leagues is to evaluate the performance of players entering the foremost division from the tier below via the promotion system. I’ve looked at this before for goals but now with better data so it can be considered for more advanced statistics.
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The graph below charts the output declines of top scorers contracted to promoted clubs upon reaching the top of the football pyramid. The data is at a seasonal level and shows attackers output in the Championship and then for their first season in the elite league from 2017 to present. On average, the leading attackers of promoted clubs have an Expected Goals (xG) rate of 14.8 in the lower tier. This falls to 5.5 at the top level. Their Expected Assists (xA) also fall from on average 6 to 2.4.

It’s not just key goal scoring metrics that highlight the standard change. The decline can also be seen in progressive carries and progressive passes statistics. The significant decline in the number of progressive passes received (blue bar) speaks to football being a team sport. The lead striker for the promoted club is not the only one finding it more challenging at the most elite level.
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Considering these standard changes is important for promoted clubs designing a strategy to survive at the top and for potential buying clubs watching on. Not all goods are equal. 

By Robbie Butler

“You are not winning any league titles with 10 draws."

These were the words of Sky Sports pundit and former Manchester United Captain Roy Keane on Sunday evening after Arsenal drew against his old team at Old Trafford. Arsenal have now drawn 10 of their 28 league games this season and are 15 points behind leaders Liverpool with just 10 games to play.

Roy is a graduate of this institution and a proud Cork man. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Law by the National University of Ireland (NUI). In the years that followed he finished an extremely successful football career, commenced management and enjoyed promotion to the Premier League, before recently becoming a notable pundit. 

Maybe the statement above was tongue-in-cheek but it is inaccurate. In fact, Roy himself played and captained league winning Manchester United teams that suffered more draws. During the 1992/93 season - United and Keane's first title - the team drew 12 games. His league winning team in 1993/94 drew 11 games, while there were 12 draws in 1996/97 on route to title number 4. 

The treble winning side of 1998/99 - often lauded by Keane and others as the benchmark for others at the club - drew 13 league games that season, accumulating just 79 points. This total was less than Leicester's title success in 2015/16, who incidentally drew 12 games. Even the great Arsenal Invincibles of 2003/04 prove Keane wrong. The North London side drew 12 games during their unbeaten season.

You can win the league drawing ten games. Roy has proved this as a player and captain. 

By David Butler
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Although I’m not sure how they arrived at the order, last week OPTA sports ranked the English Premier League as number one in their men’s league rankings. Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga and Lique 1 naturally followed  from 2-5, with Serie B in 6. While one can argue about rankings, there is no doubt that playing in these elite leagues over time is arduous and highly competitive. The ‘Big-5’ is the highest level in professional club football and as Jonathan Wilson of the Guardian argued last weekend, through the case of Raheem Stirling, ‘excellence is fragile’. The margins are minuscule at this level.  A small performance drop after a glittering career can quickly spell doom.
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Clubs and players see this coming. Given the strong economic incentives for players and clubs, the destination for the best aging talent is often Saudi Arabia, China or the USA.  Once upon a time it was Ireland. Moves to Saudi Arabia, China and USA nicely illustrate the standards drop and the intensity of the ‘Big 5’.  The graph below shows the performance in goals of 22 attacking players that have moved to these locations – these include the likes of Messi, Ronaldo,  Drogba, Rooney, Henry, Zlatan, Keane and Benzema. We see a declining trend in average number of goals scored in seasons prior to the move (blue line), followed by a bounce once the player has dropped down the levels (red line). This increases into the second season of the new club and decays as players usually come to the last days of their career. 

By David Butler

​I’m often asked by students about freely available football date…. where all the hard data work is done. I'm posting this as The Club Football Match Data was recently updated and is available here via Kaggle, now from 2000 to 2025.
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“It offers football match data from 27 countries and 42 leagues worldwide, including some of the best leagues such as the English Premier League, German Bundesliga, and Spanish La Liga. The data spans from the 2000/01 season to the most recent results from the 2024/25 season. The dataset also includes Elo Ratings for the given time period with snapshots of ~500 of the best teams in Europe taken twice a month, on the 1st and 15th.”

By Daragh O'Leary

Throughout our years of watching football together, my father and I have developed a little tradition. Whenever we are watching Liverpool (his team) and they go two goals up, he will lean forward in his seat and sigh ‘I hate two goal leads’. While I was in a different part of the country at the time, I would wager a healthy amount that he said this to my mother in my absence last Sunday just after the Reds scored their second against Manchester City.
Two things have always puzzled me about this.

One, it is an entirely illogical train of thought. As Robbie Butler has attested to previously on the At the Margin podcast, the most common results in football are 1-0, 1-1, 0-1, 0-0. All of these results can be altered by just one goal. Accordingly, accumulating a two-goal lead at any point in a match massively increases the probability of a team winning.

The second thing which puzzles me about this tradition of ours is that I do it myself when watching my own team, Arsenal.

The reason for this is probably simple enough. It could be that the thought of our teams failing to win after already establishing a lead is so painful that we overestimate the likelihood of it occurring simply because we are worried about it. I do something very similar when thinking about the probability of seeing a vampire late at night. Given that I work with data, I was interested in seeing just how irrational a fear this was. It turns out, very.

Looking at 1,140 Premier League fixtures over 3 full seasons I looked at instances where teams were 2 goals up at half time (145) and then looked at the number of times those teams failed to win the fixture (12). Of those 12 times, 7 ended as draws, and 5 ended in a loss. This means teams fail to win matches where they have gone two-nil up at half time a little over 8% of the time.

​Interestingly, however, there is a bit of deviation in the prevalence of this happening depending on whether the leading team is home or away. In the case of the former, there are 85 instances of a home team being two-nil up at half time. Of these 85, 80 ended in a home win, 3 ended in a draw, and just 2 ended in a loss for the home side. Meaning when two-nil up at half time, the home team goes on to win the fixture just over 94% of the time. 

In the case of the latter, there are 60 instances of the away team being two-nil up at half time. Of these 60 matches, 53 ended in an away win, 4 ended in a draw, and 3 ended in a loss for the away team. Meaning when two-nil up at half time, the away team fails to win just under 12% of the time. Additionally, it should be noted that there are fewer instances of away teams leading by two goals at half time compared to home teams (60<85).
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To revise on a previous statement in this post, I now find a third thing puzzling about my attitude towards two-goal leads. The results of my own analysis on the topic, which confirm that they mostly result in wins for the leading team, have done nothing to suppress me fear of Arsenal throwing them away. 

By Robbie Butler

When teams are performing poorly or a transfer window opens, the answer is always simple to most fans - spend money on players. New players always seem to be the answer. This is true whether your clubs is struggling or top of the league.  

The data below presents the relationship between Net Spend (from Football Insider) and Premier League points since the start of the 2019/2020 season for the highest spending clubs (Nottingham Forest are excluded as they did not spend all seasons in the top flight).

 

The relationship between the top net spenders in the live for all five seasons appears to be negative and the trendline downward. 

Man City and Liverpool on 440 and 409 points respectively, had the lowest net spends. City spend £265 million and the Reds just £212. Meanwhile, Man Utd spent £810 million and accumlated just 333. Chelsea also spent big (£739 million) and won just 314, four fewer than Spurs who spent just £576 million. 

Big transfer fees may not be the answer. Instead, using the squad that one has already, aquiring players that are cheaper or signing players once their contracts have expired seems to be a much more prudent approach. 

By Robbie Butler

Today Liverpool Football Club announced it will "freeze general admission and season ticket prices for the 2025-26 season." This is great news for season ticket holders and regular visitors to the stadium and is in stark contrast to what other clubs are doing, including rivals Manchester United.

The interesting economic aspect of this approach of course is that Anfield repeatedly sells-out. In fact, the stadium has reached capacity at every home game this season across both league and cup games, with more than 60,000 people in attendance. The Champions League games at home had slightly less than 60,000 fans but due to FIFA regulation not a drop in demand. Even the home FA Cup 3rd Round game against League Two Accrington Stanley - a founding member of the original Football League in 1888 - sold out. 

The slide to the right is from my sports economics classes. It captures the theoretical demand and supply of match tickets. Here is a great example of the application of these principles as the Liverpool owners are cpricing in the inelastic portion of the demand curve. 

As the stadium continuously sells-out, regardless of the competition or strength of the opposition, the owners could increase revenue by raising the price of match tickets.

The question of course is why don't they? Anyone that supports the club will be well aware of the prudent approach taken by the owners. The club has bought just one player in the last three transfer windows.

The answer is not known but could be any of the following, or a combination of these factors. Maybe the owners wish to maximise attendance or the “fan experience”. As fans are part of the atmosphere they themselves create, a full stadium is much better than an empty one. Maybe the owners are maximising non-gate revenue e.g. merchandising, food stands, beverage sales, etc. Or maybe there is some empathy with the fans. This could be a result of pressure exerted by interest groups to keep prices down. Or maybe the owners might use this as an excuse not to purchase new players or renew contracts and claim fans will not pay higher ticket prices. 

Arthur Blank, the owner of the Atlanta Falcons and co-founder of Home Depot is often attributed as saying "Fans get the team they are prepared to pay for".

​By David Butler

Is the magic of the FA cup being reignited? A shock loss at Plymouth last weekend meant that Liverpool were dumped out. Along with Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham exiting, is there a chance for a smaller club to lift the cup? Sure, Manchester City may likely still win the trophy, but at least we may get some variety.

Since the onset of the modern football era and the birth of the Premier League the ‘Big-6’ have taken up 44 (68%) of the finalist slots in the FA cup – this can even be considered the ‘Big-5’ as Tottenham have never reached an FA cup final in modern football. Over the last decade, only 4 out of the 20 finalists’ slots have been taken up by clubs outside of Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea. Of these finals, we only saw one upset in the last ten years with Leicester defeating Chelsea.

A similar story can be told for the EFL cup – 41 out of the 66-places have been occupied by the ‘Big-6’. For the last decade, only 4 out of the twenty slots have been taken up by clubs outside of the Big-6. Two of these slots are by a wealthy and resurgent Newcastle, rather than a minnow. We will have to wait and see if Newcastle defeat Liverpool, but the other three non Big-6 finalists all lost. Manchester City have tended to dominate winning this competition recently.

There are various explanations for the growing concentration. In the early years of the modern football era the biggest clubs at the time often used these cup competitions to blood youth players. Arsene Wenger at Arsenal was particularly famous for this, and Manchester United revealed their priorities by withdrawing from the FA cup competition in 1999–2000. Things have changed a lot recently – the wealth of elite clubs, the demands of playing many fixtures, and injury concerns, has required top clubs to build NFL style rosters; it is now rare to see a variety of unknown under 21 players on a team sheet for a Big-6 club.  Having deep squads – or perhaps hoarding talent – depending on how you want to look at this, means that these clubs can rotate players without significantly weakening themselves, so the likelihood of a shock exit is lower.

Perhaps the incentives for smaller clubs have changed too. Given the financial cost of relegation from the Premier League, there are clear incentives to prioritise survival over winning domestic cups.  A run in the cup is fun, but the  objective is to survive or to reach the Premier League. A similar argument can be made for mid-table clubs trying to reach the Champions League or achieve European football more generally; its a risky strategy to chase Europe via a Cup win, where pulling off a major upset in a final will likely be a requirement. Probably best to focus on the League. 

Finally, there is the issue of competition design. Recent iterations of the League Cup for example have been seeded when the clubs participating in Europe enter. This has resulted in an even lower probability of a smaller team getting a lucky run to the final as the Big-6 rivals do not meet in early rounds. Are these changes due to broadcaster demands? Recent semi-finals of Tottenham vs Liverpool and Arsenal vs Newcastle are, of course, attractive products.