Here is a link to two advertised professorial positions in the Department of Economics in University College Cork.  The closing date for applications is 27th February 2020.

​https://academicpositions.com/ad/cork-university-business-school-ucc/2019/professor-in-economics-professor-scale-2-in-economics/137370

By Robbie Butler

The 25th season of Major League Soccer will kick-off at the end of next month and will include David Beckham's new franchise Inter Miami CF and Tennessee franchise Nashville SC. This will bring the total number of teams to 26 – the highest to date.

Inter Miami will form part of the Eastern Conference, while Nashville SC will join the Western Conference. This, despite the fact that the Nissan Stadium, home of Nashville, is more easterly than Soldier Field, the home of Chicago Fire who play in the Eastern Conference. The arrival of the new franchises, and the division they play in, got me thinking about the distances these teams must travel weekly in order to fulfill fixtures.

I recall Steven Gerrard’s time with LA Galaxy and comments by the former Liverpool player that the travel involved playing MLS was exhausting. This is especially true when one compares it to the Premier League in England.

In early January, Liverpool played Everton in an FA Cup 3rd round game. During a stoppage in play, a drone above the stadium moved slightly northwards, and Everton’s Goodison Park came into view. There is less than 1 mile between the two stadiums. For newly recruited players of Inter Miami, their 'derby match' with Orlando City SC will require a 205-mile journey north. This is just shy of Liverpool visiting a London club, which is hardly a derby.

The distances a franchise will travel in the MLS arequite something. In this post I considered only the Eastern Conference. The Western Conference would appear far worse. New players for Inter Miami have some serious travel ahead, given Miami’s location. After Orlando, the next closest venue is the 580-mile trip to the magnificent Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta, a round trip of nearly 1,200 miles. This is like Liverpool heading to Cologne in Germany.

Inter Miami players will have at least seven trips in the Eastern conference that exceed 1,000 miles one way! The longest being the 1387-mile distance to play Montreal Impact – the greatest distance between two franchises in the Eastern Conference. Liverpool to Rome is almost the exact same distance.

Considering all franchises for the conference, there is probably just one derby, by European standards that is. The 20 miles separating the Yankee Stadium from the Red Bull Arena in New Jersey, homes of the New York City and New York Red Bulls.

Travel distances can be found to have significant impact on performance. I will consider the impact this has on match outcomes in the MLS in a future post. For new recruits of Inter Miami, they better be ready to travel. Although, Nashville SC will make this look short. More to follow on this. 

By John Considine

Between 2000 and 2019 there were 645 individuals who's name has appeared once next to a contribution to the Journal of Sports Economics.  One of them is from this parish (Robbie Butler).  Others have contributed more often as is illustrated in the picture below.

One hundred and twenty nine have contributed two pieces.  The names of 43 individuals have appeared three times.  And so on.

At the upper end of the distribution are names like Berri, Coates, Fort, Humphreys, Krautmann, Lee, Paul, and Simmons.  We here in Cork are fortunate that half of these leaders in the field have visited us.  Their willingness to promote the field of sports economics by their visits is much appreciated.  They have visited for the annual workshop - a workshop conceived, and driven, by Robbie Butler and run with the help of David Butler and John Eakins.

(The bar chart includes all forms of contribution, e.g. articles, book reviews, comments, editorials, obituaries, research notes, and replies.)

By Robbie Butler

Casual fans of football might have been surprised to see a score line from the Quarter Final of the Carabao (league) Cup that read Aston Villa 5 - 0 Liverpool. The recently promoted team beat the European Champions comfortably to book their place in the last 4.

What the score line doesn't tell you is that the average age of the Liverpool team was a little over 19. Probably more discrete, but equally telling, is that the sum of the squad numbers for Liverpool was just short of 1,300! That's an average of 72. The lowest number on the back of any Liverpool jersey at Villa Park was the "51" visible on the back of Ki-Jana Hoever. 

While the youngsters were battling against Villa the Liverpool first team was busy preparing in Qatar for the FIFA World Club Championship Semi-Final. Unfortunately for the Merseyside club, fixture congestion meant that the only way the club could compete in both competitions was to hold games within 24 hours of one another. 

There are many reasons why the club decided to priorities a trip to Qatar over Birmingham but probably the most obvious is the chasm in prizemoney available in both. The figures below provide sources of prizemoney for the 2019/20 season. Data for the Premier League is taken from 2018/1 as the variability in winnings are based on the number of appearances on television, as well as finishing position. 

On the left, all competitions that Liverpool will compete in are presented. The Premier League was the source of more than £150 million pounds in prize money last season. In 2019/20 success in the Champions League again would results in a windfall of around £70 million. The FA Cup could be worth almost £7 million in prizemoney.

While the FIFA World Club Championship is worth about half of the FA Cup (£3.75 million) it involves just two games. In fact, just showing up is worth in Qatar is worth £1.5 million to the Red. 

Compare this to winning the Carabao Cup. The figure to the right, takes a closer look at the FIFA World Club Championship and Carabao Cup, as the latter is too small to see on the left-hand graphic. At just £100,000 for the winners it is easy to see why Liverpool chose to head to the sun this week. 

By John Considine

The Journal of Sports Economics has entered its 21st year.  A review of the previous 20 years reveals some interesting changes.  For example, in the year 2000, Volume 1 was published in four installments.  In 2007, that became six installments.  And in 2015, Volume 16 was published in eight installments.  An impressive increase.

I had a hunch that the number of authors appearing on each paper was increasing.  I decided to check the numbers.  The results are illustrated below.  Maybe there is a slight increase.  There seems to have been an increase from the early years but for the majority of the period the average number is around 2 authors per paper.

Included in the calculation are articles and research notes.  Editorials and Book Reviews are excluded.  Comments/Replies were excluded (although one or two were hard to classify).  The individual pieces were ordered in the sequence in which they were published and I took a moving average of 20 publications.

By David Butler

Earlier this year I had entry on the Sheffield United model. This looked at their Championship squad and how it was drawn solely from the UK and Republic of Ireland talent pool. The interesting thing was that Sheffield United performed so well considering the estimated value of the players. They duly earned promotion to the Premier League.

Since joining the elite, they have added three senior players that are registered with a non-UK/Irish international team to their ranks.  Ravel Morrison, Lys Mousset and Michael Verrips. Only the latter two were born outside of the UK.

At the start of the season bookmakers estimated that Sheffield United were odds on, and the most likely of all teams, to be relegated – they estimated that they had a circa 60% probability of relegation.  How times have changed. Chris Wilder’s side currently have a circa 3% relegation chance.

Excelling in the first half of the league upon promotion is not entirely rare however. How do Sheffield United compare to other promoted teams approaching the half way point in the season? The table below shows the performance of the top 20 promoted teams since the Premier League became a 20 team competition in 95/96.

The average points of all promoted teams after 17 matches is 18 points. So Wilder is doing better than the average.

Sunderland’s 99/00 season tops the list for promoted clubs. At this stage they had 34 points – Kevin Phillip’s 30 goals that season meant that they finished 7th. Middlesbrough 95/96 season and Ipswitch Town 00/01 season comes in joint second.

By Sean Ó'Conaill
 
News emerged yesterday from the Circuit Court of the Examinership process that Limerick FC were engaged in had failed to produce a positive outcome. The unfortunate result of this is that, most likely, Munster Football Club Limited which trades as Limerick FC will have a liquidator appointed and the holding company will eventually cease to exist as a company.

Unfortunately, Irish football has a long and ongoing relationship with insolvency events over the years where a number of clubs have entered Examinership or have ultimately been liquidated. This is not a situation unique to Ireland with insolvency events a regular feature of football in most jurisdictions with Bury FC being a very prominent recent example in England.

For football clubs, insolvency events generally fall into one of two separate but often interconnected categories. Liquidation is the legal process under the Companies Acts whereby a company is effectively killed off because it cannot continue as a going concern. In the case of football clubs, this means the holding company behind the football club (usually a limited liability company of one sort or another) is being liquidated.

Examinership is the Irish legal process where a company is given some breathing space from its creditors for a set period, which can be extended, in order to try and get the company back on an even keel and to allow it to continue as a going concern. A very similar process to Examinership is known as Administration in the England and Wales and Chapter in the United States.

For football clubs, the process involves the creditors of the football club taking a significant hit on the amount they are owed but crucially it allows the company to continue in existence, usually under new ownership. Most Football Associations apply strict criteria and some sporting sanction for having entered examinership due to the perception of an unfair advantage arising from it. In the 2019 League of Ireland season Limerick FC amassed 36 points on the field of play notionally placing them 6th in the First Division (2nd tier) league table. However, having entered Examinership, Limerick were deducted 26 points which meant their adjusted league position was 10th and last.

Limerick FC entered into Examinership with a very experienced firm - Baker Tilly Chartered Accountants - taking the lead in the process. Unfortunately, yesterday’s developments demonstrate that Limerick FC and the Court Appointed Examiner were unable to secure the required investment and the holding company will now be liquidated.

This, however, does not necessarily have to mean the end for everything that Limerick FC does. The Courts have no jurisdiction to liquidate a football club, they can only liquidate the holding company. The club itself is a separate entity that exists in the football sense, is a member of the Football Association of Ireland and affiliated to the League of Ireland and some local leagues around Limerick at certain age levels. The club and the holding company, although closely linked, are not the same thing. The most superficial look at the various holding companies behind every current League of Ireland member will show that most have had multiple holding companies over their entire existence as football clubs with the vast majority having experience some insolvency events over the years.

Up until the arrival of Club Licensing this distinction made little difference. If the holding company behind a football club got into difficulty, the club would merely be spun off into a different company, and continue to compete as a club if the holding company behind it was liquidated, even if this occurred during the season (such as what happened to Cork City FC in 1996). Club licensing put a stop to these practices as it created a tighter link between the holding company and the licence required to compete at League of Ireland and UEFA level.

Cork City FC and Derry City FC in 2010 are two interesting examples of the impact of these changes with both clubs starting the 2010 League of Ireland season in the First Division. Cork City FC, while maintaining the same membership of the FAI after they were awarded the licence to compete in the First Division, had to compete under the name Cork City FORAS Co-Op for the 2010 season until the intellectual property rights were acquired by FORAS from the liquidator of the previous holding company in mid-2010.

Licences are now awarded to clubs who are members of the FAI, via their holding companies or legal entities. This ensures that clubs cannot simply preform a “phoenix trick” of running up debt and then running away from it to form a new holding company without any sanction. It does allow a certain degree of flexibility to the FAI.

This means there is effectively no prospect of Limerick FC competing next season in the First Division of the League of Ireland, due to the costs and licensing implications for the holding company at senior league of Ireland level. In any event it appears as though no licence to compete in the men’s League of Ireland has been made by those behind the holding company pending the outcome of the examinership process. There might however be some prospect of entities like the Limerick FC Women’s team and perhaps some of the other connected teams being spun out, with the help of a liquidator and the FAI, to a separate entity allowing the club to continue to compete in the Women’s National League and perhaps at some underage grades for example. This could, potentially in time become a vehicle to resurrect senior men’s football in Limerick pending the settlement of the liquidation of the holding company.

Dr Sean Ó'Conaill is a lecturer in the School of Law, University College Cork. Sean lectures sports law and is a Director of the Centre for Sports Economcis and Law (CSEL).

By Robbie Butler

In February this year I addressed the issue of Irish horse racing moving from its long-time home of Attheraces (now Sky Sports Racing) to Racing TV. The piece discusses a number of challenges for the move, particularly Irish racing's place on the new channel. After nearly one year of the new provider, some of the obstacles remain.

This week the Racing Post ran a article about television coverage of the Grade 1 John Durkan Chase at Punchestown on Sunday. In the piece, general manager of Punchestown racecourse and chairman of Horse Racing Ireland’s media rights committee Conor O’Neill,  said he was “very disappointed” that the race was broadcast on a split screen on Racing TV and lacked commentary until the final number of furlongs. 

The race shared the screen, firstly with a race from Huntington, and then Cork. As the Peterborough Chase at Huntington started before the John Durkan it took commentary from the English track. Once this ended, Cork replaced the English course in the split screen, with commentary changing to the John Durkan Chase at Punchestown. 

Of course, this only happened because of a delay of more than 10 minutes to the race at Punchestown. The race was due to start at 1.50pm. Huntington started as planned at 1.55pm and Cork 2.05pm. Because the John Durkan Chase did not start until just after 2pm, it was sandwiched between the 1.55pm and 2.05pm races.

But things may get worse. The 26th of December is the busiest day in the horse racing calendar. 11 meetings take place in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Racing TV have exclusive access to 8 of the 11 courses. One can understand the need for multiple split screens during the day, as it is impossible to sequence races so that they do not clash. And what if there is a delay?

​This is a little like an airport and landing slots. If a plane is delayed or not ready to leave it can miss a slot. Races courses won't wait however so races will proceed, later than planned, and clashes will be unavoidable. If may even be the case that three races are in running concurrently, despite the best efforts of organisers. 

There were just four meetings on Racing TV last Sunday. One has to wonder how a doubling of this to 8 can be accommodated on just one channel.