By David Butler

As the football season is ending for major European leagues it's timely to consider the COVID positive trends over the season. The chart below plots the trend in COVID positive cases for Premier League clubs from the 31st August to May 9th.

On average, there was 7 weekly positive cases in the EPL and a median of 4. 2,111 weekly tests were carried out on average. With the exception of the tests over three match weeks from the 21st of December to the 10th of January, the positivity rate did not reach 1%.  It hovered between 1%- 2% during the Christmas period.

There is a noticeable dip on the 1st-3rd January. Only 12 individuals were COVID positive. This was a shorter time period than usual and only 984 tests were carried out. I would guess the true number  of positive cases was higher. These positive cases may have been picked up the following week too, where we see the peak of 36 positive cases.
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The positivity rate tumbled from February. The 19th-25th of April was the first week of the season where no positive cases were recorded.  

By Sean O'Connor

Ireland’s opening two results for the 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifying campaign has made it extremely unlikely that Stephen Kenny and his team will be playing in Qatar come next winter. For many, this will mark another major tournament that they will not be able to attend to support the Boys in Green. While some supporters are more results orientated, others might prefer for Ireland to play a more attractive brand of football and then there is the middle ground who would like a half-way house of the two. In order to compare Kenny’s Ireland team to what has come before him, it is useful to look at how Irish teams have fared in previous qualifying campaigns. 

Today’s post looks at the fortune of Irish teams throughout qualifying campaigns from World Cup 1986, up to and including the recent Euro 2020 (2021) campaign under Mick McCarthy.  In total, the results of 167 qualifying games are examined. Play-off games are not taken into account. Figure 1 plots the distribution of score lines. To interpret, a score of 2-2 in a game would have a difference of 0, while a 3-1 win would have a difference of 2 and a 2-1 loss would have a difference of -1.

As can be seen from the below, nearly 4 in 10 Irish qualifying games (35.2%) end in a draw. This is then followed by a one goal difference win. 

As many supporters are probably aware, games involving Ireland tend to be extremely close contests, with the small margins generally making the difference.

We can also examine this by seedings and draw some interesting insights. Table 1 below expands on the graph above but breaks results out by seedings. Note prior to looking at this we should note that across different qualifying campaigns the number of teams in a group differ. Of the 17 qualifying campaigns examined, in 7 cases there were 5-team groups, in 9 cases there were 6-team groups and on 1 occasion it was a 7-team group.

Of the most frequent results against opposition teams the following are the most frequent results:
   Top seeds - Draw followed by one goal winning margin.
   Second seeds - Draw followed by one goal losing margin.
   Third seeds - Draw followed by a one goal losing margin.
   Fourth seeds - Draw followed by a one goal winning margin.
   Fifth seeds - One goal winning margin followed by a two and three goal winning margin.
   Sixth and Seventh seeds - Two goal winning margin followed by a draw and three goal winning margin.

​Finally, we can condense Table 1 further and include the addition of points achieved by Ireland against different seedings. This is done in Table 2. To interpret, out of the total 96 available points against first seeds, Ireland have won 33 or have 34.4%. As we might have thought, the majority of points for Ireland tend to come against lower seeded teams. It will be interesting to see if this trend will hold under our latest manager moving forward. 

By Robbie Butler

When almost all UEFA football came to a halt in March 2020, European leagues became frozen in time. Some leagues were cancelled, others used predicted points to reach a final league table, and others returned to play in empty stadiums during the summer months. 

While Liverpool finally won the Premier League and Real Madrid La Liga, the other three big leagues in Europe were won by the defending champions - PSG, Bayern Munich and Juventus. In the cases of Bayern and Juve, it was their 8th and 9th consecutive league titles.

​They were not alone in UEFA leagues in this regard. Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, eight teams in Europe had winning streaks of 6 years or more. These are presented to the left below.

Following the resumption of football behind closed doors it is interesting to observe how many of these streaks survived. 

Probably the most high-profile casualties were the two teams seeking 10-in-a-row; Celtic and Juventus. Both the Scottish and Italian champions failed to live up to expectations during the 2020/21 season when playing behind closed doors.

Of course, this is not the only reason why they may have come up well short, but neither looked like winning their 10th title in a row from early in the season. Inter Milan (last weekend) and Rangers (a number of weeks ago) have already been crowned champions of Italy and Scotland respectively. 

But these two are not alone in losing their streak. APOEL and Astana both lost their streaks in 2020 and 2021. Of the 8 teams that entered the Covid-19 era with a streak in tact, just 4 are still standing; Bayern, Ludogorets, Qarabag and Red Bull Salzburg. 

It will be interesting to see if a return of fans helps or hinders the cause of the four remaining streaks that have survived Covid. 

By John Considine

As the NFL draft approached, many commentators appealed to the economics of the draft to explain potential decisions.  A prime example came a few days ago when Mike Tomlin was asked about who makes the decisions in the Pittsburgh draft room.  Tomlin said “At the end of the day, Art Rooney is the boss.”  Interestingly, many of the same commentators seemed to suggest that the owners leveraged their financial power to make a decision on the player they liked in sporting terms rather than the player as a financial asset.

So, what is the economics of the draft?  A pretty good answer to that question is provided by Joel Maxcy’s chapter in The Economics of the National Football League: The State of the Art.  Published in 2012, the book remains relevant even though some of the sentiments expressed might need to be changed, e.g. in a chapter on attendance there is the pre-pandemic sentence "No one wants to watch a game [on TV] at a partially filled stadium even if they are at home."

Maxcy has three main sections in his chapter: History; Economic Analysis; and, Legal Analysis.  The headings suggest a brighter distinction between the sections than is the case.  He could easily have worked the word “economic” into the other headings.  The history section provides a concise account of how interaction between interested parties shaped the development of the NFL.  Between owners of weaker and stronger teams.  Between college and professional organisations.  Between alternative professional leagues.  Between owners and players.  The latter also shows up in the Legal Analysis section where the existence of a Collective Bargaining Agreement has possibly saved the NFL in some antitrust cases.
 
The full title of Maxcy’s chapter is “Economics of the NFL Player Entry Draft System”.  In the economics analysis section, there is some emphasis on the impact of the entry system on salaries.  Maxcy documents some of the increase in salaries that occurred when there was an alternative league.  Another part of the economic analysis section is devoted to the alternative evidence on the competitive balance impact of the draft.  And, there is also a discussion of possible biases in the draft, e.g. those in favour of major colleges and those against black players.
 
Although published almost a decade ago, Maxcy’s chapter remains a nice account of the economics of the NFL draft.  In that decade (sport) economic analysis has further shifted towards empirical analysis of larger data sets.  However, the history and legal sections of this chapter shows that analysis of individual, non-repeating, events can be significant.  Because many of these can be difficult to measure and count, it could mean that their economic, as well as their statistical, significance is lost.  Including a dummy variable for an owner is a less than ideal solution.

By David Butler

Watching the Leicester vs. Crystal Palace match Monday night I was struck by Leicester’s resilience and, perhaps, what they have learned from last season. I was also thinking about why they are exciting to watch. It seemed that they could often turn matches around. 

As a football supporter, this is where the heartache often lies for me. Yes, losing a match late on is stinging. But losing a match from a winning position brings a certain type of psychological pain – maybe there’s some loss aversion going on.

The table below shows the data for EPL clubs over the last two seasons on this topic. The ‘for’ column shows the number of times a club won from a losing position and the ‘against’ column shows the number of times clubs lost from a winning position.  It is sorted by ‘against’ (decreasing) and then by ‘for’ (increasing). This might give us some insight as to which fans have it hardest.

Spare a thought for Aston Villa fans and those who follow the Saints. Over this season and last, they have lost from winning positions 8 times. Villa fans have only seen their team turn it around 3 times.

Manchester United fans should be very happy. They have regularly shown great resilience, coming from behind (especially away from home) and have only suffered a turnaround once - against Tottenham at home this season.

Some clubs feature quite low on the list a) because they may be not even good enough to get ahead in the first place and b) because they are too good to go behind.

My intuition was right - Leicester are joint top for turning matches around, along with Liverpool.

I'll follow up on this soon and looked at how the psychological pain might be ramped up by losing from a winning position late on.

By John Considine

From early on in the pandemic, researchers have been estimating the deaths caused by the virus (now with many variants identified by geographical origin).  The most basic calculation is where current deaths are compared with the average for a previous period or periods.  Any excess is attributed to the virus.  We can take a similar approach to examine the excess number of home wins associated with the presence of fans.

As of today there have been 320 games completed of the 380 games in the 2020-21 Premier League season.  There are slightly more away wins (125) than home wins (120).  They are within 5% of each other.  What makes this surprising is that it is well below what normally happens.  If we take the 5 seasons from 2014-15 to 2018-19 then we find that home wins are 51% higher than away wins.  Following basic estimation of excess deaths, we can attribute the excess of home wins over away wins to the presence of fans.  Basic, but a good first approximation.

Below is the ratio of home wins to away wins (no draw/ties included) for this season and five of the previous six seasons.  The 2019-20 season is excluded.

The above drop in 2020-21 is not a surprise to the readers of the Journal of Sports Economics.  Last May I drew attention to a 2018 paper by Michela Ponzo and Vincenzo Scoppa that addressed the crowds issue using a wonderful set of same city derbies (here).

By David Butler

The European Super League (ESL) was a short-lived concept. One question that has been asked a lot over the week was why certain clubs were included?  A primary reason is that these clubs are in demand internationally.  

One way of gaining insight to international demand is to consider elite clubs in their off-season.  Increasingly, the founding ESL members have developed elaborate pre/post season tours in locations such as China, North America and Australia. Gone are the days of a pre-season tour in Ireland to limber up for the season ahead. These are now brand building exercises. 

Although tour fixtures are widely perceived as meaningless friendlies, in the sense that no championship points or highly-regarded honours are at stake, big European clubs continue to attract significant turnouts. Over the years attempts have been made to make pre-season friendlies more competitive (e.g. International Champions Cup) but on the surface, international fans appear to resonate to the stars coming to town rather than outcome uncertainty. 

I think the powers that be really cracked it when they realised they must export the European fixture. While the international fan likes to see their home club take on a giant of the sport, attending a Champions League level fixture is really appealing. For example, the Michigan stadium hosted Manchester United vs. Real Madrid in 2014, Chelsea vs. Real Madrid in 2016 and Liverpool vs. Manchester United in 2018; each fixture took place in front of over 100,000 spectators. This is happening for a while now. Over a decade ago Chelsea took on Inter Milan in the Rose Bowl in front of circa 80,000 fans.  

I have attendance data on 241 (non-European) international fixtures for fourteen major European clubs who regularly go on tour outside of Europe. The fixtures took place across thirteen countries, in over one hundred stadia between 2009 and 2019. The table below displays two descriptive statistics by club. Note these averages do not control for the type of opposition (local vs European competitor). Barcelona and Real Madrid top the list for highest average turnout. Many of the 12  ESL founders feature. The maximum attendances give some insight of the appeal of even inconsequential matches internationally. 

By Robbie Butler

In the context of European sports, one of the defining characteristics that generally makes it stand out from American sports is the "open" nature of competition. This is more simply known as promotion and relegation. European football, rugby, cricket, and other fields sports punish weaker teams at the end of each season and force them to play in lower tiers of competition.

This is not true of sport in much of the United States. The systems are closed. The NFL, MBL, NBA and even domestic soccer's MLS, all have no relegation mechanism. The opposite occurs in fact. The weakest teams get earlier draft picks, meaning that US sports are typically more balanced than the laissez faire European leagues. The US leagues are generally controlled and managed by the owners of the franchises. In Europe, the clubs are almost always answerable to a different and 'independent' body that administers the competitions they compete in.

In 1888 the Football League was founded. It was in essence a break-away but up to that point fixtures were generally arbitrary. The twelve founding members competed until January 1889. The 4 bottom teams were not relegated but the concept was there - all 4 successfully sought to be re-elected to the league. Therefore, the idea of relegation has been within the Football League - the first football league anywhere in the world - since it's inception. 

In 1992 another break-away league started in England - The Premier League. This was an innovation inspired by sports across the Atlantic. There was opposition at the time to the creation of the Premier League. The movement of all games to subscription television was one of the most contentious issues. 30 years on this decision has revolutionised the game. It has turned small English cities and towns into globally recognised places. Stoke, Burnley, Norwich, Bournemouth, Brighton. The list goes on. 

The announcement of the next break-away league involving English clubs - the European Super League - is nothing new. There are however a number of key difference between this and both 1888 and 1992.

The first is the competition structure and removal of relegation. Such a move would be an Americanisation of European football and a major departure from the accepted norm.

The second is the step outside the national boundary. While European competition has existed since the 1950s, qualification to this was through the domestic leagues. The new Super League would eliminate the need for this. 

The third strikes at the monopsony power of UEFA. While a monopoly is a single seller of a product (something many of us are familiar with) monopsony is a single buyer. As a result the monopsony essentially controls the market as it is the sole purchaser of the goods or services that potential sellers wish to bring to market. This market power can be wielded in order to control the market.

While the major US sports such as NFL, MBL and NBA are better examples of monopsony power, UEFA holds this in a European context. Should one wish to play professional football or operate a football club, UEFA is the sole buyer of this service. It therefore holds monopsony power over the market for European football.

A European Super League would end this, and create a new dynamic in the market. The clubs would be self-governed within this new league and would make the structure resemble something much closer to the American model rather than the European system.

UEFA are not lying down. A ban on playing in all UEFA and FIFA competitions (e.g. the FIFA World Cup) is now the penalty for playing in the new Super League. 

This has a long way to run. Supporters are notoriously conservative when it comes to changing aspects of the game that have deep historical roots. Even largely superficial changes to colours or names have been vigorously rejected by supporters. Moving location - another regular happening in the US - is met with fierce opposition in Europe. Completely upending between 60 and 130 years of competition structure (depending on where you want to draw the line) will be far from straightforward, if even possible at all.

By John Considine

A recent paper in the BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine gathers a range of evidence that seems to confirm the obvious - the risk of Covid-19 transmission in golf is low.  It is hard to imagine a sport more suited to our current circumstances.  It is a non-contact sport. It is played outdoors on 5km-7km greenways.  At most 150 players are spread across this distance.  Individuals are socially distanced at ranges from the arc of the golf swing to the flight of the golf ball.  In many cases, the only shared equipment are flag sticks and bunker rakes (although the latter have been removed in many cases).  Even here the risks are low according to the BMJ paper.  The authors (Robinson, Foster, and Murray) cite other work that showed "only 0.74% of COVID-19 virus was recoverable at 1 min in high inoculum when applied to a variety of sports equipment (including a golf ball)".

There should be few problems with reopening the sport but the wider golf economy may take a while longer to recover.  Estimates of consumption expenditure on golf were produced a couple of years ago in a commissioned report.  Some are reproduced in Table 4.1 below.  Many of the items that contribute to the overall total continue to suffer due to the pandemic.  The €46m generated from "Food and Beverages" is unlikely to return to these levels anytime soon.  A similar point could be made about the fourth, fifth, and sixth items in Table 4.1.  These will be hit by the problems associated with international travel.

It is worth drilling down into the €38m figure for Green Fees.  It seems pretty low when you consider that there is approximately 400 golf course on the island of Ireland.   With a green fee of €50 it approximates to about 6 rounds per course per day.  Not a lot.  It leaves plenty of tee-times for the members.  However, that is not the full story.  The distribution of revenues from Green Fees is skewed towards some of the more iconic courses.  A prime example is Lahinch.  It held the Irish Open in 2019 when Jon Rahm proved best of the bunch.  It was expecting revenues of approximately €2m in 2020.  Other courses that have held the Irish Open and Ryder Cup are also favourites of the golfing tourists.  They were expecting Green Fee revenues measured in the millions.  A small number of these courses capture a large proportion of the €38m in Green Fees.  Much of it from international tourists.

Many of these iconic courses have associated accommodation.  The €37m figure for Accommodation in Table 4.1 will not accrue in 2021.  Only when international travel returns to something like normal will these revenues be recovered.  In the short-term even the Irish are not free to play whatever course they wish due to national travel restrictions.  It is a tough time for a sport that poses a small Covid-19 health risk.

By David Butler

It’s hard to be a fan of VAR with its many quirks. At times it is as if the lines are drawn with MS paint.

As fans and pundits rage online on a weekly basis over VAR calls, one part of me does have sympathy for those administrating VAR. Our eyes can deceive us. When we think a player is onside, in fact they may not be. Visual illusions are a mainstay of introductions to behavioural economics – they usually set things up nicely for discussing information-based biases – it follows that if you can’t trust your eyes what else can’t you trust?  

Unsurprisingly, Daniel Kahenman offers a nice insight in Thinking Fast and Slow when discussing the famous Müller-Lyer illusion inset.

“You know that the lines are equally long. If asked about their length, you will say what you know. But you still see the [middle] line as longer. You have chosen to believe the measurement, but you cannot prevent System 1 from doing its thing; you cannot decide to see the lines as equal, although you know they are. To resist the illusion, there is only one thing you can do: you must learn to mistrust your impressions of the length of lines when fins are attached to them. To implement that rule, you must be able to recognize the illusory pattern and recall what you know about it. If you can do this, you will never again be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion. But you will still see one line as longer than the other.”

​Is it time to start trusting the technology? As we are often reminded on TV, us viewers only see one angle. Or at least, should we start recognising that our perceptions might be fallible?  

Accepting our intuition failures might be easy for the Müller-Lyer paradox, but this is harder for sport. Fans have clear allegiances and are emotionally engaged. System 2 has to work even harder!