by Declan Jordan

​This season’s Airtricity League of Ireland kicks off this week. The Premier Division features 10 teams, with 12 teams in the First Division.
 
Colleagues in UCC will be disappointed that this season the local side, Cork City, will be plying their trade in the First Division. The relegation of Cork City last season followed a rapid decline, since the club were league and cup double winners as recently as 2017, and were in the top two league positions for the five seasons from 2014 to 2018.
 
Aside from the local disappointment, the relegation of Cork City also has implications for the geographical representation of the league and reduces the reach of the league into the major population centres in Ireland.
 
This season there are no Premier Division clubs in the second, third, and fourth largest cities in Ireland. Cork, Limerick, and Galway will all have teams in the First Division this season. This is a combined urban population of approximately 400,000 without a top flight team.
 
The relegation of Cork City, even with the relegation of Shelbourne from Dublin, and their replacement with Drogheda United and Longford Town means there is a greater concentration of clubs on the east coast. The map below shows the location of clubs in the Premier Division in 2020 and in the coming 2021 season. The red dots represent clubs in both; green are clubs only in 2020, and yellow dots represent clubs only in 2021.

The green line demonstrates that the west and south of the island are not represented in the 2021 Premier Division season.

​By calculating the distance between every club in the division (using Google Maps) the level of spatial dispersion can be assessed. In 2020 Cork City had to travel furthest on average than all of the other clubs with an average distance to all of the other clubs of 296km. This ‘honour’ now goes to the only remaining Munster club, Waterford FC, who will travel 246km on average this season. The presence of Derry City and Finn Harps reduce their average travel distances because of their proximity in the peripheral north-west of the island.
 
Six of the clubs (clustered around the greater Dublin area) have average distances of less than 130km this season. The average distance travelled has fallen from 190km to 158km. This means the concentration of east coast/Leinster clubs provides means that they have notably lower average distances than the average.

​The lack of clubs in the top flight from Sligo in the north-west right down the west and south coast as far as Waterford means the league is geographically lopsided. It will have to be seen how competitively lopsided the league will be on the pitch.

by Declan Jordan

Today sees the return of the Airtricity League of Ireland for a new season. It seems there is hardly a season goes by in this league where there hasn't been a change of format, and so it is with this season. The Premier Division is once again reduced to 10 teams for the first time since 2011. This will be the sixth season out of sixteen since the move to summer football that there have been 10 teams in the Premier Division.

For fans in Munster there is also the added excitement of three clubs from the province in the League for the first time since 1994, when Limerick, Cork, and Cobh were in the top division.

This season Cork City (the champions), Limerick FC, and Waterford FC will play each other four times in the league. Clubs from these cities were mainstays in the top tier of the league right up to the early 1990s and it is a common complaint about the league that Dublin clubs have dominated in the last two decades or so. There are well-founded worries about the viability of clubs in the provincial cities because of that Dublin dominance.

However, a look at the experience of the league since the move to summer football in 2003 suggests that Dublin dominance may be waning. The table below shows the spread of top tier clubs by province, including a column for Dublin. The location of the champions is indicated by a box for each season, with a tick when the champion was based in the capital. Note that I have included Bray Wanderers as a Dublin team, which might not make too many Seagull supporters happy, but most functional region factors would suggest they are within the Greater Dublin Area (not least its connection to the Dublin by light rail). 

The data suggests a decline in the dominance of Dublin clubs, indicated by the lack of a champion since 2013 and a reduction in clubs from Dublin in the top tier. It seems there is a concentration within Dublin among a smaller group of clubs - Shamrock Rovers, Bohemian FC, St Patricks Athletic, and Bray Wanderers. In the early to mid part of the last decade there were clubs that have since failed to keep up (Shelbourne and UCD) or gone out of business (Dublin City, Sporting Fingal). Cabinteely joined the league in 2015 but have not come near to promotion in that time. Is it a coincidence that Dublin football clubs have slipped away just as the Dublin gaelic football team has dominated their sport?

Perhaps too much shouldn't be read into the last couple of seasons for Dublin clubs, as the league has been dominated by Dundalk and Cork City. The former were champions for 3 seasons and runners-up last year. The latter were runners-up for 3 seasons before their breakthrough last season. These clubs have been able to reinvest money earned from European competition and player transfers to the UK to maintain their hold on the best playing talent in Ireland and keep ahead of any chasing pack.

The distribution of clubs outside of Dublin, and greater success for those clubs, can only be good for the sustainability of the league. It remains to be seen if Dublin clubs can be revitalised to challenge again. The sports economist in me wants to see strong Dublin clubs, because competitive balance and regional balance are good for the league. The Limerick FC fan in me however wants to see Munster dominance for a while.
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by Declan Jordan

Any cursory analysis of sports would demonstrate that there are spatial or geographical differences in the performance of sports clubs or athletes, and in the popularity and participation of various sports.

What is striking about the current Winter Olympics is the concentration of competitors and medallists among a smaller number of countries than the Summer Olympics. This is hardly surprising given that some countries have an advantage in winter sports because they see lots of snow in winter. Ireland will never be a powerhouse in men's snowboarding or women's mogul.

Even in popular sports that do not require specific climactic conditions, like football or rugby, there are spatial concentrations in participation and performance. Within many football leagues there are persistent high performing clubs and at international level there are some countries who consistently excel. In 20 years of the FIFA World Cup, only 12 different teams have played in the final, with just 8 different winners.

It is surprising to me that there has not been greater application of spatial analysis to sports performance. To date, most academic literature focused on the spatial aspects of sports have been concerned with the localised impacts of sports clubs or the hosting of large sports events. That is the literature has tended to look at the effect of sports on locations, rather than the effect of location on sports.

In a recent paper in Regional Studies, Justin Doran and I examined the effect of geographic proximity between clubs on performance in the English football League over 21 seasons. We tested for spatial interdependence, that is that a given club would perform better if it is nearer to a high-performing club and worse if it is near a poorly performing club, all other things being equal. We controlled for club wealth, managerial churn, and other locational factors, such as location in London and population density. 

The map on the left shows the location of all clubs that have played in the English football leagues in every season between 1993 and 2013, weighted by average performance. Performance is measured by end of season position. More detail is available in the paper.

We found that location matters for performance, even after controlling for those other factors. We found that "clubs perform better when they are located closer to other well-performing clubs, and the poor performance of some clubs is explained by the relatively poor performance of close clubs. This suggests that location matters for performance in English football, just as it has been found to matter in other sectors, even though clubs are largely immobile, do not share locally provided intermediate inputs, and rely (increasingly) on global labour markets rather than on local labour markets".

There is, in my view, a potential rich research agenda on the effects of location on sports performance.

To tap into this agenda I am co-convening a special session on Spatial Aspects of Sports Performance at the Annual Congress of the European Regional Science Association (ERSA) in Cork at the end of August. My co-conveners are Robbie Butler of this parish and Paulo Mourao of the University of Minho. Details of the call for papers for the special session can be accessed here. It is intended that the special session could lead to a special issue in REGION, the journal of ERSA. 

If you would like to take part please submit an abstract proposal by the deadline of February 28.

by Declan Jordan

The Regional Science Association International - British and Irish Section hosts its annual conference in late August. Next year I am hoping to organise a special session on the spatial aspects of sports performance and the spatial impact of sports investment. The 46th annual RSAIBIS Conference will take place in 2017 in Harrogate in Yorkshire on August 23rd and 24th. This is a week before the European Sports Economists Association Conference in Paderborn.

That economic activity tends to concentrate across locations is a now a well-observed stylised fact. Regional economics has a long-standing literature on the effects of location on business performance (using an array of measures), economic growth, well-being, and This literature considers the impact of place on economic, and the impact of the activities of economic agents on the place in which they are located.

To date, there is a lack of spatial analysis of sports performance, management, and development. This is despite the clear differences in participation, popularity, and performance of different sports across space. Also, within individual sports there are differences in performance of clubs in different locations, and the extent to which this is facilitated by the characteristics of the location is under-researched. Most spatial analyses involving sport have focused on the impact on local or regional effects of large sports-related infrastructural or mega-event investments. 

If you would like further information about the special session and/or would like to submit an abstract please contact me as session organiser at [email protected].

by Declan Jordan

My research interests of regional and sports economics probably mean I am very drawn to locational or spatial factors affecting sports performance. There is a very large literature on the effects of location on the performance of businesses, whether measured by innovation, productivity or profitability. As far back as 1890, Alfred Marshall recognised the tendency for economic activity to concentrate spatially - driven, he suggested, by external benefits to concentration (now referred to as localisation economies) including knowledge spillovers, availability of skilled labour, and access to specialised inputs. Michael Porter argued in 1998 that "paradoxically, the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things". Recently I have done some work on this spatial aspect of performance, such as here. 

This area is a potentially very interesting one for sports economics and regional science, as the special features of sports leagues and competition and the availability of data make it possible to get at important spatial effects.

An obvious feature of sports is the importance of different sports across locations. Of course some of this may be obvious, where winter sports are perhaps more likely to be popular in colder locations. However, are there significant differences in success rates spatially, and can these be attributed to local features? Ireland may be an interesting case here, since the country is so small it is difficult to see why sports may be consistently successful on a regional or spatial basis.

I have just begun to look at the data for Ireland, but the table below is an interesting starting point. It shows the location of the winners of the League of Ireland (football), All-Ireland Gaelic Football championship, All-Ireland Hurling championship and All-Ireland rugby league since 1980 categorised by NUTS3 region. There are, of course, some data issues. NUTS3 classification has not been in place since 1980, there have been winners of each title (with the exception of hurling) from Northern Ireland in that period [these have been excluded], and the rugby league has only been in place since 1992. I have chosen 1980 because it allows me to include a football winner from the Mid-West - my own club Limerick who last won it back then.

Some counties do not have a senior hurling team or a team playing in the League of Ireland or at senior club level in rugby. However, there is nothing to prevent a team from any county participating and progressing in each of these sports, and the failure to have a team at those levels may indicate the lack of popularity of those sports in that county and/or the dominance of another sport there. (A difficulty also arises for the separation of Tipperary into two NUTS regions, while they compete as one county in gaelic games. Tipperary championship wins have been split 50:50 between the Mid-West and South-East regions - which explains why there are "half-wins" in hurling).

The table shows the number and proportion of winners by region. It is noticeable that for each sport there is a region that has won over half of the titles. Also, the most successful region is different for each sport. In some regions the success is driven by one county (such as Kilkenny in hurling in the South-East or Kerry in Gaelic football in the South-West).

It is clear that even in a small country like Ireland location matters for success in particular sports. There are some possible explanations, such as a type of demonstration effect where athletes in a county/region are drawn to the success of a particular sport in that area. This means history matters and there is an element of cumulative causation. This could also occur in relation to attracting funding and sponsorship. Perhaps there are strong clubs at the level under these elite championships that generate stronger competition and better players and teams at the elite level.

These are all interesting potential explanations and the research agenda for spatial analysis of sports performance in a fascinating future research area.