Next month the 15th Annual Gijon Conference on Sports Economics from the Sports Economics Observatory Foundation (FOED, University of Oviedo) will be held in Gijon (Spain).
Gijon is synonymous with sports economics thanks mainly to the work of Plácido Rodríguez and others who have made the annual event in northern Spain part of the sports economics calendar. Along with Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez and Julio del Corral, Plácido has just published "The Who and the What of the Journal of Sports Economics–20th Anniversary Edition". I wrote about this recently here.
The event in Gijon next month does not focus on a 20th anniversary, but rather a 50th anniversary. As the Organising Committee say Gijon XV:
"is a tribute to two of the pioneers in the field of economics of the sport, with two facts that they did 50 years ago. Roger Noll organized in Washington, under the auspices of the Brooking Institution, the first Conference on Sports Economics in 1971 and Peter Sloane, that year, published one of the most relevant articles in the field of sports economics: ‘The Economics of Professional Football: The Football Club as a Utility Maximiser".
What a wonderful occasion this will be, to hear about Roger and Peter, both part of the sports economics community.
The 50th anniversary is very appropriate as the 1970s marked the start of what was probably the birth of "sports economics". 1956 and 1964 were outposts to this point. However, what has followed from 50 years ago has created the field that we see today.
The forthcoming book Advances in Sports Economics commences with a brief history of sports economics where Noll, Sloane and others, and their seminal contributions to the field, are highlighted. The book is available on general sale from next month from Agenda Publishing and Columbia University Press.