By John Considine

"Bayesian Instinct" is the title of an SSRN paper by Etan Green and David Daniels.  It is a paper that I have read more than once.  I can’t decide if I fully agree with the argument and I don’t know why I can’t.  There is a nagging doubt that I’m giving the authors the benefit of the doubt because I like the paper (and probably don’t fully understand it).
 
Like many others, Green and Daniels examine the calls of baseball umpires.  In keeping with this literature there is no shortage of decisions being examined.  In keeping with this literature Green and Daniels find that the umpires’ decisions are not purely a function of ball position.  The dynamics of the game matters.
 
Most of the literature suggests that classifying a baseball in position X as a “ball” on one occasion, and as a “strike” on another occasion, implies an error on the part of the umpire.  In this literature, the strike zone is fixed.  In this literature inconsistency implies error and any statistical correlation with non-rule factors implies associated bias.
 
Green and Daniel disagree with the “attribution of bias”.  Green and Daniels make the case for a varying strike zone.  A sort of situational umpiring.  This is driven by the view that “pitchers and batters behave differently in different counts” and the umpires expect such changes.  It means that the umpires expect a different distribution of ball positions depending on the count and this conditions their calls.  It seems a plausible explanation of reality.  The predictive power of their model provides empirical support.
 
My natural inclination is to try to reconcile the competing perspectives.  However, that will take a few more readings.

​By Robbie Butler

The 14th European Sport Economics Association (ESEA) Conference will be held at University College Cork from the 23rd - 25th August 2023 and is being hosted by the Centre for Sports Economics and Law (CSEL). Abstract submissions are welcome relating to any area of sports economics, including theoretical, empirical and conceptual papers.
 
The deadline for submission is now just 2 days away - 31st of March 2023.

Full details on the call for papers, keynote speakers, the preceding PhD student workshop and conference events can be found online at https://www.cubsucc.com/esea-home/.

Papers presented at the conference will be invited to be submitted to the conference issue of the International Journal of Sport Finance (IJSF).

By David Butler

Having talent playing in elite leagues seems important to sustained elite performance internationally.

For Ireland,  a problem is not so much that we do not have Irish players in the Premier League anymore but rather they do not get as much game time anymore. Added to this, they tend not be contracted to the most elite clubs as much as in the past. It's a quality rather than quantity issue. 

We’ve always tended to have the same number of players playing in the EPL – this varies from about 18 to 37 by season - but the average game time that has fallen. The graph below plots Irish player average minutes in the EPL from season 1 (92/93).
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In the first year of the EPL, Irish players clocked up about 22 matches on average over the season, this has fallen to about 4.5 matches last season. There is a clear trend in the graph. 

One could argue though that the minutes currency is not a constant value? Maybe modern minutes are more valuable as the EPL has become globally dominant? 

By Adam McCarthy and Thomas Könecke (KU Leuven)

Adam McCarthy is also a UCC graduate from the BComm (International) degree.

In 1956, Simon Rottenberg’s seminal article stated that sport leagues are a business anomaly in that no club can succeed economically if there is a significant gap in quality between teams. Rottenberg hypothesised that sporting talent must be distributed equally among the contestants of a sporting competition to make it attractive for supporters. However, in many professional football leagues, only a few teams are effectively competing for the championship. An extreme example is the German Bundesliga, where Bayern Munich have won ten championships in a row. Nevertheless, the league still had the highest average attendances in European football from 2013-18. Similar observations can be made in other European football leagues.

One explanation for this is that, besides the championship race, there are further sub-competitions in professional European football leagues, such as qualifying for UEFA competitions and avoiding relegation. The theory of Competitive Intensity (CI) takes this into account by looking at “the degree of competition within the league/tournament with regards to its prize structure” (Kringstad and Gerrard, 2004, p.120).

In an effort to quantify CI, the senior author of this article and colleagues introduced and refined an ex-post measurement of seasonal CI, the CI-Index (CII), in a series of studies (Wagner et al., 2020, 2021, 2022). It is derived from the final standings of each season and weighted by a matchday ratio representing the matchday on which each sub-competition was decided. The weight is intuitive and the model can portray individual contributions of each sub-competition to CI. It is flexible and can compare different league structures but does not consider league evolution.

The CII model allows us to break down and analyse sub-competition contributions to CI. Our analysis of the Bundesliga shows, for the seasons from 1998/99 to 2021/22, the championship race generates, by far, the lowest values. The sub-competitions closer to the middle of the table, such as direct and indirect qualification for the Europa League, show the highest values.

Another model to measure CI was proposed by Scelles et al. (2011). It is called intra-championship competitive intensity (ICCI) and consists of 2 parameters, intra-championship uncertainty (ICU) and intra-championship fluctuations (ICF). They are not combined to form a single measure, but are used separately. In an effort to get a more comprehensive picture of CI in the German Bundesliga, we correlated CII and ICU for the time between 1998/99 and 2021/22 (figure below).

​ICU was chosen because it looks at different moments of the season and conveys the possibilities of “fast” sub-competition fluctuations (a fluctuation here simply means that a team’s league position changes after a matchday and they end up in contention for a different sub-competition). Accordingly, ICU is dynamic and considers the league development, which the CII does not. 

As can be seen in the figure above, CII and ICU have a mildly positive correlation for the German Bundesliga in this period. Both measures have declined recently, which is to a considerable extent attributable to Bayern Munich’s domination in the championship race. Yet, the illustration also shows that the competition should be far from boring because both measures observe a considerable degree of competitiveness when all sub-competitions are taken into account.
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Of course, further research is necessary to solidify the findings described here and to further refine CI analyses. Nonetheless, it is obvious that CI measures are useful when comparing leagues and drawing conclusions on how to foster competitiveness and demand from a regulatory and business standpoint.

By John Considine

After winning Saturday’s Milan – Sanremo, Matthew van der Pol was asked if it was special to win the cycling race that his grandfather had won sixty years earlier.  His reply was, “For sure, not only because he won it.  It’s one Monument every rider wants to win one day”.  After the race I decided to revisit The Monuments by Peter Cossins in an effort to discover what the grandfather had achieved.  What I found there added to the enjoyment of the race.
 
Van der Poel’s grandfather “… Raymond Poulidor, ‘The Eternal Second’ who finished on the Tour de France podium eight time but never won it, … not only missed out on the Tour title, but never even managed to spend a day in the Tour’s fabled yellow jersey”.  Why would anybody be surprised that it might be extra special for his grandson?  And there is more.  Peter Cossins tells a wonderful tale about Poulidor’s victory.  It starts with explaining how Poulidor “had decided to quit the race when he punctured in Varazze 125km from the finish and had to wait two minutes before Mercier team manager Antonin Magne appeared on the scene ...”.  Magne’s strategic contribution to the victory is worth reading.
 
There are five parts to The Monuments – one for each of the races.  Within each part there are four chapters.  These chapters have a chronological order.  While it is primarily a documentary account of how each race was won, it is more than just a sporting history.  Ernest Hemmingway and Rudolph Valentino make a brief appearance.  Politics is ever present in the book.  Mussolini looms large.  A decree renaming Sanremo as San Remo being the most obvious example.  His regime is viewed as contributing to the reduction in foreign cyclists during the 1930s.  This is not surprising in a sport where national identity is important for the cyclists, fans, and promoters.  It is best captured in the words of the Italian Fausto Coppi after his 1946 win over a French rival.  Coppi said, “My compatriots, who were weary and embittered by the war, were counting on me to bring them some satisfaction”.
 
Economics also runs through the chapters.  In the early years, there is an explanation of the incentives for newspapers to establish and promote the race to a public who were heavily dependant on the bicycle in their everyday life.  Later, as motorised bikes and cars become affordable, there is a discussion of the implications for team sponsorship.  There are some wonderful descriptions of how cyclists would be provided with tangible incentives to win particular races.  Lorries and sports cars being promised by those associated with the teams.  There are financial incentives agreed between cyclists for cooperative effort or cooperative reduction in effort.  And, throughout there is an account of how race organisers adapted the challenge of the route to provide a test for the riders and spectacle for the fans.
 
It is a lovely book that primarily examines the human stories about what happened on the road.  It does not shy away from the darker side of the desire to win.  Banned substances appear more frequently in later chapters but they are also there in the early years.  By not turning a blind eye to what was happening, Cossins allows the reader to understand the context where the blind-eyed Biagio Cavanna openly aided rider performance with “substances designed to fortify them”.  The human context frames our response.  I got more enjoyment out of van der Poel’s win after reading about his grandfather.

By Robbie Butler

The 14th European Sport Economics Association (ESEA) Conference will be held at University College Cork from the 23rd - 25th August 2023 and is being hosted by the Centre for Sports Economics and Law (CSEL). Abstract submissions are welcome relating to any area of sports economics, including theoretical, empirical and conceptual papers.
 
The deadline for submission is just 11 days away - 31st of March 2023.

Full details on the call for papers, keynote speakers, the preceding PhD student workshop and conference events can be found online at https://www.cubsucc.com/esea-home/.

Papers presented at the conference will be invited to be submitted to the conference issue of the International Journal of Sport Finance (IJSF).

By Robbie Butler

Last week a special report by the University of Gloucestershire shed light on the economic impact of the 4-day Cheltenham Festival which starts again today. The study, which was first conducted in 2016, finds that the event was worth an estimated £274 million to the local economy. This is a huge jump (no pun intended) on the 2016 figure when the Festival was estimated to be worth £100 million to the town.

From a sample of more than 4,000 racegoers, the key findings  from the project, led by the University’s Finance in Society Research Institute (FSRI), were: 

• The total economic impact (direct and indirect) of the 2022 Cheltenham Festival is estimated at £274 million – up from an estimate of around £100 million when the project was last undertaken in 2016.
• More than half of racegoers make a return trip to and from Cheltenham on the day they attend The Festival.
• Of those not making a return trip to the town, about a third of attendees arrive a day or more before The Festival and stay at least a day or more after the festival. 
• The average expenditure of attendees at The Festival increased from £584 in 2016 to £697 in 2022. 
• Attending The Festival was on the ‘bucket list of things to do’ for two-thirds of the participants (67%), and more than half (53%) of respondents ‘always or usually attend’ the Festival (source here).

1 in 3 attendees was from outside of the UK, and no doubt the vast majority of these came from Ireland. Follow-up studies are promised and it will be interesting to see how this research develops. 

By David Butler

Commentating on Manchester City vs Newcastle last week, Sue Smith spoke about the impact of Newcastle’s loss in the League Cup final. To paraphrase - she suggested that the League Cup losers league performance can suffer after a final defeat. I suppose the folk theory goes that losing in a final carries debilitating psychological effects that spill over into the league. What tweaked my interest was that she used the term ‘statistically’ when discussing this.

For non-football fans the League Cup final occurs mid-season in the English football calendar, usually taking place about round 25-27 (late February to mid-March) of the League tournaments. This cup competition runs parallel to the League and the other major cup competition, the FA Cup.

So do the negative effects of a League Cup final loss during the mid-season spill over into the League? The basic stats would suggest not.

From 1992/1993 up to 2021/2022 there has been 24 League Cup finals where the loser was a Premier League team – looking at the points per match accumulated before and after the final, this has actually increased 13 times and only decreased 11 times. So, more losing finalists actually have a greater points per game ratio after a league cup final defeat.

Of course, there have been some catastrophic collapses after a League Cup final loss – Leeds 1995/96 season being the most obvious. Arsenal's decline in form after losing to Birmingham in 2011 is another memorable example. Maybe these salient memories are the basis of the intuition? Usually, any dip in form - if there is one - is minor; Tottenham were beaten finalists in 2015 – they recorded 1.69 points before the final and 1.67 afterwards. The same minor difference was observed in 2017 (Southampton), 2018 (Arsenal) and 2020 (Aston Villa).

Perhaps this is another one for the football myths list!

By John Considine

Yesterday, for the first time in 20 years, there was a particular format to a team time trial in professional road cycling.  The difference was that the team time trial was based on the first rider over the line rather than the fourth or fifth rider.  This changed the calculus and strategy of the teams.  It also reduced the potential penalty for a good rider on a relatively weaker team.
 
The week-long race from Paris to Nice pits two of the best, if not the two best, riders against each other.  It is possible to make the case that either Tadej Pogacar or Jonas Vingegaard is the best rider in the world.  However, there is little doubt that Vingegaard has the better team in his Jumbo-Visma teammates.  This was illustrated yesterday in the team tactics.  UAE-Team Emirates riders did as much work as they could for Pogacar before leaving him finish the stage alone.  By contrast, Vingegaard crossed the line with two teammates and all three had a faster time than Pogacar.  This tilted the advantage to Vingegaard but the gap would have been bigger if Pogacar had to wait for a few of his teammates to cross the line with him.
 
Last year I wrote about how the 2022 version of La Vuelta provided an ideal set of illustrations for economists.  Within that stage race there was individual time trial where individuals had to optimise like the textbook Robinson Crusoe on his island, there was a team time trial that presented individuals with a cooperation problem, and the majority of road stages involved a combination of competition and cooperation.  The team time trial differentiated the 2022 La Vuelta from the other Grand Tours of 2022.  The warm reception to yesterday’s format change suggests that the experiment will be repeated.  More illustrations for economists.

By Robbie Butler

The League of Ireland returned to action last month and has reported some impressive attendance figures. However, while these numbers are showing a slight upward trend, attendance at Ireland’s national league has never recovered to the heights of the 1950s and 1960s. The decline coincides with the arrival of English football on television screens, the growth of European competition and the birth of Match of the Day.

Viewership of yesterday’s Premier League game between Liverpool and Manchester United eclipses the weekly demand for all domestic league matches. In general, Irish football fans “import” the game.

In some respects, Great Britain is doing the same. Not with football of course, but horse racing. The Cheltenham Festival – the most prestigious and valuable national hunt event of the calendar year – will start next week. 28 races are held over four days.

In times past, English trained horses dominated the Festival with few winners from outside. For example, in 1989, there was not a single Irish trained winner. Excluding 2001, when there was no Festival (due to foot and mouth disease), this is the last time this has occurred.
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Times have changed. The Prestbury Cup - celebrating the annual challenge between Great Britain and Ireland for Festival winners – is now dominated by Ireland. The “away side” won 18-10 in 2022. And the trend is very much upwards.

Irish trained horses are currently ante-post favourites for 20 of the 28 Festival races. If the Irish horses did not travel, the event would be greatly reduced in quality. The opposite is not the case of Ireland’s leading Festivals where English horses travel in small numbers, if at all.  

The Cheltenham Specials offered by bookmaker Paddy Power also demonstrate the power of the Irish hand. They estimate that there is almost a 60% chance that Irish trained horses will win 2 races in every 3. Two Irish trainers are odds-on to saddle 5 and 10 winners respectively.
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British racing is now importing much of its appeal from Ireland, in the same way Irish football fans import the game from Britain. The difference is that horses can travel to run where they wish; football clubs cannot play where they wish. Wimbledon and Dublin learned that lesson in the late 1990s.