A recent paper published in the Journal of Sports Economics suggests that there is a benefit to scoring just before the half-time break in soccer.  Their results are based on a statistical analysis of four seasons of data from the Top-5 European football leagues.  The authors note that their results are at odds with previous statistical studies on the same issue.  And, they suggest that the differences might be accounted for by the way the studies went about doing their evaluation.  Indeed.

What is meant by scoring "just before half-time" and how is it supposed to impact team performance?  I expected that scoring "just before half-time" would be defined and measured as the distance from half-time, e.g. t-1sec, t-2sec, and so on.  I expected the measurement to work backwards from half-time.  Not so.  It works forward from the start of the game.  It is defined as the 41st to 45th minute after kick-off.  Added time at the end of the first half is wrapped into that period.

What about the channels through which it is supposed to impact team performance?  Virtually all of the channels listed as potential explanations are psychological.  It is about what happens inside the body/brain of the players.  A statistical analysis of sports data with potential psychological explanations of correlations.  (We might wonder where is the economics but that only takes us into the murky area of defining economics.)

We might also wonder what psychologists might think about the approach.  One well-known and respected psychologist is Timothy Wilson.  In the second chapter of Redirect: Changing The Stories We Live By, Wilson has two subsections labelled "VIVA THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD" and "STATISTICAL MAGIC?".  The question mark captures his caution about the way the statistical method can be used.  He says "multiple regression is the tool of the trade for many economists, sociologists, and psychologists.  In these researchers' defense, sometimes it is impossible, for practical or ethical reasons, to perform an experiment using random assignment to condition."  Not all caution the reader about the strength of their findings.

It is to the credit of Philippe Meier and his co-authors from the University of Zurich that their Journal of Sports Economics paper provides the reader with a clear outline of their methods, the limitations of their measurement, and the extent to which their results differ from previous work.  That is not always the case in the literature.  Increasingly readers are presented with "big data" and a range of more sophisticated statistical techniques with the presumption that these overcome any underlying issues about causation.

By David Butler

This is the second part in a series of posts offering insights to different topics for the 19/20 Premier League season. Previously, I considered VAR (see post below).

Here I’ll consider expected goals in each of the 380 matches. While most have become familiar with Xg’s – it is even used on Match of the Day now – for those that are unacquainted with the concept this is a measure that evaluates a team’s efforts on goal relative to the difficulty of the chance created. Lots of information on a given shot (player positioning, distance from goal, angles, body-part used etc.) is plugged into a statistical model which, in turn, produces the xG stat. A high xG for a team generally transfers to more dangerous chance creation. It might be considered a measure of threat or maybe a means to capture the ‘entertainment value’ of a match.

The match with the highest Xg this season was Manchester City vs. Watford. The home team won 8-0. Unsurprisingly, this high Xg was largely caused by City’s excellent performance. Watford were actually involved in the three matches with the highest Xg’s. A neutral fan would have been well entertained if they followed the Hornets.

At the other end of the distribution is (boring, boring) Bournemouth. They were involved in the three the matches with the lowest Xg’s this season. They didn’t score in any of these three games and were beaten 1-0 on all occasions. The Cherries goals drying up is probably the main reason for their demise. Indeed Burnley’s’ 1-0 win at the Vitality stadium just before Christmas could be considered the least entertaining match of the season, although a goal was scored. Even at that Jay Rodriguez left it late (89th minute winner).

By Robbie Butler

The Galway Races went ahead under unusual circumstances last week. Normally a highlight of the Irish summer, and most attended race meeting of the year, the 7-day festival played out in front of empty stands. For the past number of years I have followed various trainers on this site - most recently Willie Mullins. Had anyone followed Mullins last week (using our normal rules) they would have made a considerable profit from the County Carlow based trainers' 10 winners. 

This post doesn't focusing on 'beating the bookies' but rather an interesting race dynamic that deserves some attention. For those unfamiliar with the Galway race course, the track is a relatively sharp, undulating, right-handed mile and a half where race position is key. This is especially so in sprints which can be as short as 7 furlongs. 

In these 7 furlong races the horse draw (stall) is crucial. The draw is randomly allocated to each horse prior to the race and can be anywhere from stall 1 up to the 16 or 17. The problem for those drawn "high" - roughly stall 10 or higher - is that horses meet a sharp bend after about 1 furlong or so in 7 furlong sprints. it is the equivalent to being drawn in lane 6,7 or 8 on a running track and meeting the bend after 50 meters. Horses drawn in stalls 1-5 have a decided advantage if they break well and meet the bend on the rail. 

The upshot of this is that it is very hard for horses with high draws to win sprint races at Galway. Of course, the odds should factor this in but I get the impression that they adjust less than they probably should. There may be an inefficiency here that could be of interest on the betting exchanges. The table below provides information on the average position of the first 4 horse in the 28 flat races that had 9 runners or more. 

By David Butler

I’ll do a series of short posts offering insights to different topics for the 19/20 Premier League season. 

Where else can I start but with VAR – the villain of the piece. Now that the season has finished, how frequent were VAR controversies given the current implementation of the system and rules adopted?

On my count, there was 82 VAR controversies this season – about one in five matches were afflicted by a VAR debate. Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, there are no obvious team-specific patterns.

My magic 82 number is partly a judgment call but I'm confident it is in and around this figure. 

Defining a crisp criteria is tricky of course. Most of my controversies were defined by players offside by a pixel (or armpit!), the ball grazing a hand in the lead-up to a goal and incidents where penalties were/were not given. There were others too. Generally, the VAR controversies were associated with plenty of media debate and publicity. 

There are lots of uses of VAR not included in the 82. For example, take Ryan Bertrand’s straight red card for a reckless tackle on Ayoze Perez in Leicester’s 9-0 win against Southampton. VAR made this decision. I can’t see this red card being defined as a controversy under any definition. Other uses of VAR, such as when a player is clearly off-side for a goal, are also not included in this 82.

No doubt, this '1 in 5' stat is something the Premier League will want to reduce. This may involve changing the handball rule or encouraging referees to you use the touchline monitor more often. Improving the technology is important too. For me, many 'offsides by a pixel' fail to place the same precision on when the ball actually left the foot of the assisting player.  

Improving referee’s training must also be high on the list for administrators. As we are often reminded, VAR is for clear and obvious errors. If referee’s make less clear and obvious errors the frequency of VAR controversies should subside. 

By Robbie Butler

During the course of our summer break the sad news broke that two internationally respected and renowned sports economists passed away.

On the 4th of June, James (Jim) Quirk left this world. Jim was a retired Caltech Economics Professor (1971-1987) and a leading voice in sports economics. In 1971 he published “An Economic Model of a Professional Sports League” with Mohamed El Hodiri in the Journal of Political Economy.

Professor Quirk would later go on to publish highly influential papers including Cross Subsidization, Incentives, and Outcomes in Professional Team Sports Leagues in the Journal of Economic Literature (1995) and Owner Objectives and Competitive Balance in the Journal of Sports Economics, both with Professor Rod Fort (University of Michigan), as well as “Stadiums, Arenas, and Major League Sports: The Twin Cities’ Experience”, in Sports, Jobs and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Sports Stadiums (Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist, editors). A fitting obituary to Jim Quirk can be found here.

Just one month later, on the 5th of July, Vanderbilt University Professor Emeritus John Vrooman also left us. John was another international voice in sports economics and had been writing in the area for more than a quarter of a century. In 1995 Prof. Vrooman published A General Theory of Professional Sports Leagues in the Southern Economics Journal. This paper is cited almost 450 times to date.

John would follow this up with other notable contributions to the literature including Theory of the Beautiful Game: The Unification of European Football in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy (2007) and Theory of the Perfect Game: Competitive Balance in Monopoly Sports Leagues (2009) in Review of Industrial Organization. Until last month he kept
​the "Sports Econ Blog" active. His last post is dated June 11th 2020. An obituary to John Vrooman can be found here.

May they both rest in peace.

By John Considine.

Over the last few days, I was reminded of the importance of reference points in arguments about the economics of sport. A few days ago, a story broke about a player, from an organisation that prohibits pay-for-play, offering a skills coaching session for a fee. It is provoking a fair deal of debate.

This was one of the stories discussed in yesterday’s Off-the-Ball Paper Review. Another discussion involved the loss of boxing talent (partly) due to financial constraints. The public funding of boxing was compared to the public funding of swimming. No prizes for guessing how boxing looked by comparison. And yet another newspaper story discussed involved Nike and the Clean Clothes Campaign.

Consider the presentation of the arguments by Nike and the Clean Clothes Campaign. The Clean Clothes Campaign, and those who support it, compare the payment received by the workers to the salaries of Premier League footballers and the price paid by customers for replica shirts. Nike compare the payments to their workers to those of similar workers. The comparisons are chosen to illustrate the arguments.

Dean Rock is a gaelic footballer. Like all gaelic footballers he is not paid to play gaelic football. However, he is paid by the Irish government to be available for selection to play for his county. Dean plays for Dublin – a county that has won the last five All-Ireland senior football titles. Dean is their player who takes more than his share of Dublin’s free kicks in the scoring zone.

Why the debate? It is useful to consider the reference points, or comparisons, used in the debate. Consider who Dean is compared to. The unpaid coaches from his childhood. The paid kicking coaches of other sports. The other county players who provide unpaid coaching. The other county players who take payment for coaching sessions. The paid strength & conditioning coaches. The unpaid strength & conditioning coaches. The unpaid club officials. The paid officials operating at county or Croke Park level. The paid games development officers.

A favourite comparison is with the money paid to the managers/coaches of GAA club teams. This ignores a more amusing comparison and what it says about the GAA. Many GAA clubs pay the “expenses” of a manager/coach from outside their club but they will not pay the “expenses” of somebody from inside the club. A few years ago, a club I know of, was coached by a member who had played with the club since childhood. He travelled over 200km per session to coach the team. No expenses. The club decided it needed an outside manager/coach in an effort to get promoted. That person’s services would require a financial outlay. No problem. The new coach would make the short journey was from a neighbouring parish. He was paid “expenses”. He did take them out of the division. Unfortunately, he took them down and not up. Relegation and not promotion. The old coach returned the following year. Promotion was secured. Expenses were not.

Whatever the club thought they were buying, it was not the quantity or quality of coaching. I see a similar situation annually in terms of academic coaching/teaching. Every year I hear about students who skip some of their lectures and tutorials that are provided by qualified, experienced and committed staff. Yet, they pay for private tuition in the same subject. The funny part is that they complain about the money being made by the private sector operator.

On the surface, it seems that the payment is for Dean Rock to impart his knowledge of free-taking. However, there is probably more to it. A parent might purchase the service for their child for the same reason that other parents buy the rights for their children to walk out at Anfield holding the hand of Jordan Henderson or one of his teammates. A wealthy aunt or uncle might decide it is an ideal present to show how much they care for, and think of, their nephew/niece. Or maybe a club might purchase Dean’s time to convey to their players that they are prepared to invest in the team’s development.

What I like about the Dean Rock service is that it says it will involve the "subsequent evaluation of this practice". Obviously, it will be far from a randomised control trial. Will it be based on a comparison of in-competition success rate? Will it involve a comparison of player A's conversion rates before and after the intervention? Or will it involve a comparison of free-takers coached by Rock versus those not coached by Rock? How will it control for other circumstances? I'd imagine that a few opponents might engage in verbals questioning the person's decision to get such coaching and reminding them of it after every unsuccessful kick.

To use the title of Alvin Roth's book, the Dean Rock service raises questions about payments in the GAA. Who gets what? And Why?

As is customary, we will take our summer break at this time of year.

We will return at the end of July and wish all readers a safe summer.

By Robbie Butler

Horse racing seems to be the sport that dropped the curtain on sport quite late on these islands  (late March). The Cheltenham Festival inexplicably continued as normal until sport was called to a halt in the UK the following week. Irish horse racing went on for longer with Thurles being broadcast in free-to-air television in the UK. 

 The curtain was raised  again this week. With racing in the UK returning at Newcastle on Monday, and Kempton Park yesterday, the show is very much back on the road. The 2,000 and 1,000 Guineas will be held at Newmarket over the weekend, while Irish horse racing will return at Naas next Monday the 8th of June.

One noticeable difference to the before and after Covid break has been the reduction in prize money on offer. The table below provides an overview of some aspects of this. 

The difference between Ireland and Great Britain are listed. While not identical, there are similarities. British races will see an increase in prize money at the lowest end of the races. Class 5 and Class 6 races are now more valuable. This is not the case in Ireland. Maybe this is because about 2/3 of all prize money is sourced from exchequer funds. 

By Robbie Butler

The Club by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg is an excellent overview of the rise of the English Premier League told through fascinating stories of those of involved. There is a book review on this site if anyone wants to know more. Gary Neville's recent comments about how English Football League clubs are in grave financial peril got me thinking about one of the stories in the book.

According to Neville the top tier clubs in the Premier League, and not the British Government, should bail out clubs in the lower leagues that face bankruptcy. MP Damian Collins claims this could be 10 clubs in the coming days. Huddersfield Town owner Phil Hodgkinson is far more pessimistic and told the BBC “50 or 60” ELP clubs could be forced out of the game if stadiums are empty when football returns.

The story in The Club that this reminded me of was a meeting of US-based Premier League owners in the early 2010s. I think the book recalls a meeting in a classy New York restaurant which included representatives of the Glazers, FSG and Stan Kroenke. (The book remains locked in my office so I cannot check as I still don't have access).

As the story goes, the owners of bitter rivals Man Utd, Liverpool and Arsenal met to discuss their investments. In years gone by it would have been unheard of for such a meeting to take place with local owners. But the Premier League had changed.

The US ownership model is very different. While owners compete on the pitch, they are committed to cooperating off it. In this sense sports economics is almost unique as it requires competition and cooperation. One of the topics up for discussion at the meeting? Relegation.

For many in the US this is a strange concept. It does not exist in the major leagues. Franchises that finish bottom or near the bottom are not punished by demotion to a lower league. In the Premier League, and other major football leagues, this is the ultimate punishment. For American owners, this is far from ideal. If they could, they would probably undo the 150+ year tradition of promotion and relegation, to ensure their team could never leave the paradise and riches that is the Premier League. The value of their investment would soar.

Unfortunately for them, 72 other clubs in the Football League and hundreds of others in the non-leagues would never allow this to happen. Relegation will remain. The negative consequences of this for team owners each year are there for all to see. Just ask American Ellis Short, the one-time owner of Sunderland, who endured a double relegation before selling the club. The Nextflix series Sunderland Till I Die captures the story.

So when Gary Neville calls for the Premier League clubs to rescue those in the lower leagues, I wonder about the motivations of either side. Neville is a co-owner himself of 4th tier Salford City. Naturally, he would like to see investment flowing from the top tier to the lower leagues.

But if Huddersfield Town owner Phil Hodgkinson is right, and 92 clubs were to become 42 or even fewer, this would dramatically alter the competition structure. Imagine if just 30 clubs survived. Could relegation be scrapped? Could two equal conferences emerge with a play-off system. Sounds familiar. It's the MLS and other major sports leagues in the US.

If only the Premier League survived, the owners of each club would see the value of their assets soar. Relegation would be no more. Just guaranteed top flight income and revenues indefinitely.

By John Considine

A couple of years ago, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) conducted research into the time commitments of inter-county, amateur, gaelic games players to their sport.  One of the findings was that approximately one-third of the players involved in a given year will not be involved the following year.  Many cited the competing demands of their professional career as a reason for stepping away.

Around the same time, I heard a radio interview with a recently retired player.  During his inter-county playing career, the player had captained his county to All-Ireland success.  His brother would have been on the same team had he not decided to become a professional Australian rules player.  In the radio interview, the player noted how he came to realise that having a professional career outside of sport helped alleviated stress arising from sport.  He contrasted this situation with the stress involved for his brother every time he was due for contract renewal.

Recent research in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology might help explain some of the benefits to having a professional career outside of sport.  “How stressful is retirement! Antecedents of stress linked to athletes’ career termination” examines the stress associated with retirement of professional athletes and links it to their personality traits.  It is not a comparison between professional and amateur athletes.  However, the findings are informative.  One of the findings is that “if athletes’ passion leads their identities to be not exclusively based on their sportive activities, but it leads to harmoniously integrate these activities with other important life domains, stress linked to ending one's professional career should be significantly reduced and the passage toward the beginning of something else much easier.”

At first, it struck me as odd that of the 420 professional Italian athletes in the study there was no soccer player.  Over 30% of the athletes were rugby players and another 22% were involved in Winter Sports.  On reflection, the lack of soccer players makes sense.  Few of the non-soccer athletes are likely to make enough money during their sporting career to negate the need to find another career.  The transition is unlikely to be easy.
 
The data from the ESRI study shows that it is not easy to combine a time-hungry amateur sporting career and a professional non-sporting career.  However, it may make the retirement decision less stressful.