By Daragh O'Leary

Something which has always puzzled me about GAA is the interest (or lack thereof) which certain counties have for particular sports. I grew up just outside of Cork City and while a certain number of people (Nemo GAA fans) will tell you otherwise, hurling seemed to be the code which inspired the most interest among people. This could be attributable to the success of the Cork hurlers when I was a child, but the pattern seems to be similar for all other Munster counties – with the notable exception of Kerry.

As a general rule of thumb, hurling seems more popular in Munster than football. Even counties which have a big interest in hurling outside Munster (Kilkenny, Galway, and Wexford) border Munster counties. The rest of the country however, seem happier to play with the big rather than the small ball.

Many have tried to examine why this is the case before and some have come up with nice enough suggestions.

A lovely paper by Kevin Whelan looks to explain the prevalence of hurling in the south through arguments related to land and culture. While I don’t doubt that these could be contributing factors, I think there could be another element to the equation. Recently, I came across an interesting paper in European Sports Management Quarterly which looked to explain sporting success through an economic geography concept called relatedness. I can’t help but wonder whether this has something to offer the conversation.

For those not yet indoctrinated into the exciting World of economic geography, relatedness is a concept used to explain economic activity through similarities between different types of activities. Essentially, the idea is that success in one industry may be positively influenced by success in another related industry.

For example, regions which have a series of successful restaurants may also have a similar aptitude for successful cafés due to similarities between the two. Obviously restaurants are not cafés in the same way they are also not car factories, but restaurants are certainly more related to cafés than they are to car factories. The relatedness coming from the fact that a restaurant is a food shop which might serve coffee and cafés are coffee shops which might serve food. As a result, the resources used by one may be easily transferable to the other. Knuepling and Broekel use a similar train of thought to explain success in Olympic sports in their paper.

Here’s the idea. For country C to be successful at gymnastics, they will need to have certain resources which facilitate success in gymnastics e.g., talented gymnasts and expert coaches. These resources could also possibly function as inputs for success in other related sports like Olympic diving or trampolining, but would be less relevant for success in unrelated sports like boxing or football. As a result, country C’s propensity for success in gymnastics may be influenced by the level of relatedness gymnastics shares with the sports country C is already successful at.

A good example of this from real life is that quite a few Irish rugby players were also good Gaelic footballers. Some examples include Tommy Bowe, Robbie Henshaw, and Gavin Duffy. Obviously rugby and Gaelic football are not the same sport, but the skills required for one could also be useful in the other e.g., handling, kicking, jumping, pass-orientated decision making, and general physicality.

In the case of hurling, the sport may share greater levels of relatedness with hockey and cricket given that they are all stick-based field sports. It is fitting then that Kilkenny is Ireland’s most successful hurling county and was also the country’s previous capital of cricket. This is highlighted in Michael O’Dwyer’s book, The history of cricket in County Kilkenny - the forgotten game.

I can’t help but wonder whether Kilkenny’s success in hurling may have been influenced by the sports relatedness with cricket. The popularity of cricket in Kilkenny would have presumably meant that Kilkenny had certain cricket-orientated resources like players and equipment which could have been more easily transferable to hurling than they were to football.
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While I haven’t yet found sufficient data to allow me to test whether this is the case or not for Kilkenny and other hurling counties, I am now actively on the lookout for it and implore anyone with an idea of where this could be found to contact me. 

By Robbie Butler

Based in Germany, the "Women in Sport Economics, Management and Sociology Research Initiative" is a project seeking to increase the "visibility and perception of female professors in sports economics, sports management and sports sociology".

The project is led by principal investigator Prof. Dr. Pamela Wicker (Bielefeld University, Germany) who is supported by colleagues Dr Katrin Scharfenkamp and Lara Lesch, and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

The website - https://wisems.org - provides information on the project, those running the initiative and  how others can get involved. 

By David Butler

The European club footballing landscape report was released last week by UEFA. This can be accessed here.  It is an interesting read and I think some of the data in here could be a useful point of departure for students searching for ideas. The variation in practices and rules across leagues are well defined in the report.  For example, UEFA show how domestic leagues adapted their schedules for the World Cup, in addition to outlining the suite of post COVID format changes across leagues. There is also data on squad size variations across leagues, player usage and salaries and transfers. 

The key picture that captures the economic fundamentals for the Irish context is below.

By Robbie Butler

It has been reported that financial technology company Revolut are set to become the new sponsor of the Republic of Ireland senior team. The jersey had been without a sponsor since 2020 when communications company Three failed to renew their deal with the FAI.

Back in 2019 and 2020 I wrote about the fact that the Republic of Ireland is widely believed to be the first international team ever to place a sponsor on their jersey. This happened back in 1986 when German car maker Opel was placed on the famous green kit. You can read the extended piece here.

Most will probably be happy and relieved with this new partnership as it will bring much needed funds to the FAI. This is in contrast to the past number of weeks here in Cork. An extended debate was held over naming rights on the GAA stadium which was recently redeveloped. 

Páirc Uí Chaoimh was officially opened on the 6th of June 1976. The iconic stadium has been redeveloped on two occasions and is often referred to locally simply as "The Páirc". Several weeks ago it was reported that the venue would be renamed "Super Value Park" under a naming rights agreement with the Irish supermarket chain and Cork County Board. Unsurprisingly, there was vocal opposition to this move. 

This month an agreement was reached so that the venue was renamed "SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh". This appears to have allowed for both the sponsorship of the stadium and the retention of the original name, in honour of Padraig O Caoimh, the General Secretary of the GAA, 1929-1964.

By Owen Williams
 
The 2023 Rugby World Cup was held in France and hosted 20 nations separated into 4 groups who played in 9 different stadiums across the country. For my TY Work Experience week with Dr Robert Butler at UCC I have researched some of the environmental costs of this tournament.
 
For the calculations that follow we assumed that the teams would use airplanes as their main source of transport and that a total of 60 people (34 squad players and 26 staff) would be aboard flights. It is estimated that for every person on a plane (Boeing 737-400) 115g of CO2 per passenger per kilometre is produced.
 
We also assumed that the nations travelling to their first game were travelling from the relevant capital cities.
 
Some of our findings are as follows.
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Our estimates suggest that total team travel to and about France for the tournament was just under 190,000km. This travel was associated with the production of just over 1,300 tonnes of CO2. The mean distance travelled per game was 3,890km resulting in 26.8 tonnes of CO2 emissions on average.

The maximum distance travelled for a game was 21,493km resulting and produced 148 tonnes of CO2 from airplane travel. This game was contested by Japan and Chile in Toulouse. For reference, this equates to enough energy to power 29 homes electricity for a year and to charge 18,000,000 smartphones.

Other notable games with high CO2 emissions were France (0km) vs New Zealand (18,979km) resulting in 131 tons of CO2, Ireland (275km) vs Tonga (17,056km) resulting in 120 tonnes of CO2 and Australia (16,294km) vs Georgia (3,370km) resulting in 140 tonnes of CO2. Out of the 48 matches only 6 amounted to more than 100 tonnes of CO2.

3 games resulted in 0 tonnes of emissions: New Zealand vs Uruguay (Group A), England vs Argentina (3rd place playoff) and New Zealand vs South Africa (Final). All teams had played their last games in the same location. 33 matches resulted in under 10 tonnes of CO2 being emitted.  

To conclude, the World Cup was a fairly climate friendly affair. This is mainly due to France being a small country and teams not having to travel huge distances during the tournament. All games with over 50 tonnes of CO2 emissions were games where at least one team had to travel from their home country. After the initial travel to France the emissions from travel fell considerably.

Owen Williams is a Transition Year student at Glanmire Community College, Cork.

By John Considine

A fair proportion of the pundits argue that Arsenal needed "to sign a  No.9 who will score 20 plus goals a season".  Others will reply with either "City won the title with a false-9 before the arrival of Haaland" or "Liverpool's Salah is not a No.9".  The original contributors to the debate are likely to come back with "City needed Haaland to win the Champions League" and/or "Salah is scoring like a No.9".  And the debate will run on.

In the debate, it would help if there was a clearer distinction between the number of goals and the distribution of goals.  The picture below attempts to show both elements.  The size of each ball represents the number of goals.  The bigger balls are on the left of the picture.  These are Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal and so on.  The Hirschmann-Herfindal Index measures the concentration of goals amongst the goalscorers.  The highest value is for Bournemouth where Dominic Solanke does most of the scoring.  Arsenal have the least concentrated distribution of goals.

​Arsenal have the same number of goals as Newcastle but a greater spread of the goals amongst its players.

Bournemouth are one place in the table, and one point, above Fulham.  Fulham are second to Arsenal in terms of the distribution of scorers.  On these numbers it is hard to make the case for Fulham needing a No.9.  Yet, they were one of the main Deadline Day movers.  They signed a traditional No.9 from Chelsea on loan.  Maybe actions speak louder than words.

 By Robbie Butler

Next week (Tuesday 6th of February 2024) University College Cork (UCC) and Marketing Institute Ireland, Cork Branch will host a "Business of Sport Event" in the iconic Aula Maxima, UCC.

The event, co-organised by Dr David Alton from the Department of Management & Marketing, CUBS at University College Cork will include speakers from across sport and business. Detail on the event are as follows:

​Registration for this event is essential. Tickets are €15 for Marketing Institute Ireland members, and €25 for non-members. All UCC students and staff can attend the event free of charge.

Event Registration Link (UCC Students): https://forms.gle/arhoBU35pwX1fK5c9

Event Registration Link (UCC Staff): https://forms.gle/6JnsHFfV8JBxtPK26

Registration Link (Non-UCC Personnel): https://mii.ie/marketing-events/the-business-of-sport-2/

By Robbie Butler

I am delighted to report that we have a paper recently accepted in the European Journal of Operational Research exploring the impact of Covid-19 infection on player performance across top European football leagues.

COVID-19 infections represent a recurrent source of workplace absenteeism impacting labour productivity. Using a unique matched employee-employer dataset, we consider the effects of the virus on the performance of highly valuable employees when returning to work: professional footballers in the top five European leagues. This offers a window to study job scheduling and managerial decision-making.

We manually construct a matched dataset for 229 players who tested positive for COVID-19 in 66 clubs across the top 5 European Leagues (Premier League, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, Serie A and La Liga). ​There is natural variation in the timing of these infections. Positive cases were recorded from the 8th of March 2020 to 26th of April 2021, and our data cover performances in the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 seasons.

Importantly, our dataset excludes false positives, goalkeepers, COVID positive players that transferred to or from leagues outside of the top 5 over our sample timeframe, youth/reserve players and players that were relegated or promoted with their club. We employ then apply a difference-in-differences estimator that compares the performance of infected players to a matched control group for game tasks that require physical exertion.

Our results suggest that per-minute performance is unaffected upon returning to play. This is likely due to effective management of minutes on the pitch. We carry out a battery of checks on the primary results to consider causal mechanisms outside of infection that could impact the results such as lockdown breaks, clusters within squads, and scheduling effects.

The findings carry an optimistic message and specifically speak to managers supervising physical labour. If appropriately managed, infected workers can return to past performance levels.

The full paper is available open access and free to download here.