By Robbie Butler

The 2019 SSE Airtricity League Of Ireland Premier Division kicks off tonight with reigning champions Dundalk's game at home to Sligo Rovers broadcast on free-to-air television. State broadcaster RTE have so far announced plans to screen 18 live games from the domestic league, with further games inevitable as the season progresses. 

As the national league recommences, talk turns to which teams are likely to be successful. The currently stability within the Premier Division is something this has never happened before in the near 100 year history of the league. Many are predicting that Dundalk will continue their dominance at domestic level, which has been broken just once since 2014. The current champions are odds on to retain their crown in 2019.

Whether the reduction in competition witnessed over the past 5 seasons (thanks to the success of Dundalk and Cork City), has caused a negative impact on interest is debateable. In fact, some may argue the opposite. 

Since the emergence of the Dundalk-Cork "duopoly" in 2014 demand for attendance at games does not seem to have been dramatically effected. Figures from last season (2018) show attendance levels of almost 36%, relative to stadium capacity. This is higher than any of the four season previous.

​The figure below chart this, and also presents total ticket sales, as a fraction of stadium capacity, for the six clubs that have appeared constantly in the Premier Division from 2014 to 2019. 

Total attendance as a percentage of total stadium capacity (thick black line) has risen from 28.5% in 2014 to 35.7%.

It is interesting to observe the drop in 2016 to 25.04%. What might be causing this? It seems to be largely driven be declines in attendance demand at the top clubs; Dundalk, Cork City and Shamrock Rovers.

​There are a number of possible explanations. The first is that Dundalk's domination was viewed as a reason not to go to games. The club won their third league title in a row in 2016. The Louth club also performed remarkably well in the Europa League that season, reaching the group stages. Maybe supporters became less attracted to the domestic game after being treated to Maccabi Tel Aviv, Zenit Saint Petersburg and AZ Alkmaar in Oriel Park?

​The upside is that demand has risen in 2017 and again in 2018. Let's hope interest in the domestic game can continue to build . This can only be good news for Irish football and its domestic clubs. 

By Robbie Butler

In August last year, Sky Sports lost the right to screen live La Liga matches in the UK and Ireland. I wrote above this here. It was a blow to subscribers of the sports channel, as games were regularly shown live on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening. Along with this, Sky Sports News regularly showed highlights of games from Spain's top division.

There may be an upside however. With the Champions League returning to our screens this week and next, it is the first opportunity to watch the likes of Lionel Messi, Antoine Griezmann and Luka Modric, crowned both "The Best FIFA Men's Player" and " Ballon d'Or" winner in 2018, since the World Cup in Russia last July. In the case of Gareth Bale, many have not watched him play since his Man of the Match performance in the 2018 Champions League Final last May. 

Before we were saturated with the best players in the world through the broadcasting deal Sky had secured. The loss of La Liga has reversed this trend.This brings me back to my childhood, and memories of watching many of the best players rather infrequently. It wasn't that I didn't want to watch these players, but rather that games were not broadcast and access was not available.

The UEFA European Championships and FIFA World Cup provided a rare chance to watch some of the best players in the world. In the case of top European talent, there would be a chance to see these players every two years at international competitions or maybe on a Sunday morning highlights reel. The top South American talent, particularly those playing in Brazil and Argentina, only appeared on our screens every four years. 

I often wonder how much I suffered from an availability bias - to only use salient examples that come readily to mind to make judgments - and representativeness  - drawing conclusions from very small and biased samples. Did this play a part in our evaluation of  all of these players were rarely encountered. For example, Brazilian players were held in awe. We couldn't watch these players on a regular basis and footage that did arrive on our screens was always showcasing the best talent.

For example, Denílson de Oliveira Araújo became the most expensive player in the world in 1998, when Spanish club Real Betis paid São Paulo £21.5 million for his services. At the time I had heard about his remarkable step-over routine. I built a narrative around this. Whilst he was a player of talent, that came on in the 2002 World Cup Final, he was not the player I expected him to be, having watched him at length. In fact, many of the international players that were showcased as being far better than the players we watched on a regular basis, were in fact no better. 

As broadcasting of all players across the world has become more readily available, I wonder to what extent the diminished mystery of those coming from places that were once largely unknown to everyone but scouts (Brazil and Argentina come to mind) has impacted upon their chances of success at global football tournaments?

17/23 and 19/23 players from the 2018 World Cup squads for Argentina and Brazil played with a UEFA affiliated league. European opponents at the 2018 World Cup would have been very much aware of their strengths and weakness. The 1970 World Cup winning squad from Brazil didn't have a single European based player. Argentina had just 6 European based players in their 1986 winning squad, only 3 of whom started the Final. Even the most recent South American winners, the 2002 Brazil squad, had a majority home-based squad with just 10 UEFA based players.

The rise of broadcasting, of not just domestic players, but all players globally, has coincided with a decline in success of teams outside of Europe at the World Cup. Maybe this is coincidence. Maybe not - perhaps the dissemination of information plays a greater role?. Regardless, I am looking forward to watching players that I have not seen in months, live on television over the coming weeks. 

By David Butler

For those who are not familiar with the game, the Premier League runs an official ‘fantasy football’ competition online.  Laypeople can pick a team each week, accumulate points and pit their knowledge of the Premier League against other fans from around the world. The game is one of strategy and luck; fans have a limited budget and must select which players to back.

Recently it came to my attention that Magnus Carlsen, Norwegian chess grandmaster and the current World Chess Champion, was placed 111th in the fantasy football premier league. According to The Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), Magnus Carlsen is the best male chess player in the world as of February 1st. At the time of writing his position in fantasy football’ had dropped slightly to 224. This is remains an exceptional performance, particularly as he competes against over six million others.

Maybe I am wrong to think luck has a major role in this game? Perhaps strategic competency plays a greater part.  In this case perhaps Carlsen’s strategic genius, when it comes to chess, spills over into other domains?

This reminds me of a paper by Palacios-Huerta and Volij from 2009 published in the American Economic Review called Field Centipedes. Their paper considers the psychologically difficult process of backward induction between laypeople and chess players. The latter group habitually practice the art of thinking multiple steps ahead and reasoning backwards.  In this game two players take turns deciding whether to earn a marginally greater share of a growing pot of money, or to pass the money over to their counterpart. The equilibrium prediction is that defection should occur on the first round – the game unravels from every other stage back to the first. The major finding of the Palacios-Huerta and Volij study is that expert chess players play this game quite differently from students. 69 percent of chess players show signs of sophisticated strategic reasoning and stop immediately, mirroring the predictions of game theory. All Grandmasters in the experiment stopped at the first round.

I don’t know how many other grandmasters play fantasy football but perhaps they should be the source of advice for all things Premier League!

By John Eakins

If there was ever evidence of the importance that sport plays in our everyday lives it must be the recently released list of the top 50 viewed TV programmes for 2018 (here). Sport dominates the list with 26 of the top 50 programmes comprising of live sporting events. Three sports are represented in this list, Football, Rugby and GAA with 14, 9 and 3 events respectively. The fact that Football and Rugby were particularly prevalent is not entirely surprising given that the FIFA Football World Cup took place last year and also given the success of the Ireland rugby team in winning the Grand Slam and Six Nations tournament and attaining a clean sweep of wins in the Autumn internationals including a win over the World Champions, New Zealand.

It is perhaps difficult to capture the relative popularities of the different sports using the data we have. If we take a simple measure of the most watched programme for each sport, Rugby had the most viewers (Six Nations: England V Ireland, 975,600) followed by Football (2018 FIFA World Cup: Croatia V England, 924,400) and then the GAA (All Ireland Hurling Final: Galway V Limerick, 854,400). But if we take (albeit rather crude) measures of the average rank and average viewership for the top 3 programmes for each sport, the GAA fairs a little better with a higher average viewership of its top 3 programmes in comparison to the top 3 programmes in Football. Both sports still lag behind Rugby on both counts however (Rugby: Average Rank of Top 3, 4.7, Average Viewership of Top 3, 877,200; Football: Average Rank of Top 3, 12.3, Average Viewership of Top 3, 739,133; GAA: Average Rank of Top 3, 13.3, Average Viewership of Top 3, 747,900).

An examination of these figures over time can provide some additional insights. I collected equivalent data for the top 20 viewed TV programmes from 2012 to 2018. The first graph below shows the number of sporting events in the top 20 across these years and a breakdown by sport. The first observation is that the number of sporting events with high viewership figures is generally increasing over time with 5 sporting events in the top 20 in 2012 and 2013, 12 in 2015 and 2016 and 10 in 2018. Rugby and Football figure prominently with these figures, being boosted by Ireland’s involvement in the 2015 Rugby World Cup and EURO 2016. But even in Non-World Cup years such as 2017 the figures hold up well with a relatively even distribution across the three sports.

By Robbie Butler

Our 5th annual gathering will take place on Friday 24th of May 2019 at University College Cork.

This year’s workshop will focus on demand issues in sport. 

The event this year is co-funded by the Department of Economics, Cork University Business School and College of Business and Law at University College Cork.

More information relating to the event can be found here.

By Stephen Brosnan

Last week, I discussed the principal-agent problem in college basketball between Duke University’s star forward Zion Williamson and their three-time Olympic gold medal winning Coach Mike Krzyzewski. The principal agent problem arises when two parties have different incentives and the principal cannot ensure the agent acts in their best interest. This led to me thinking about the incentives facing NBA teams vying for Zion’s signature.

The best chance an NBA team has of drafting Zion Williamson is by winning the NBA draft lottery and receiving the number one overall pick. However, in order to do so teams are faced with a perverse incentive. A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result which is contrary to the interests of the incentive makers.

The NBA draft is an imperfect system, which rewards the teams with the worst win percentages with a greater opportunity of obtaining a high draft picks. As such, NBA teams are incentivised to ‘tank’ i.e. intentionally lose games in order to increase their chances of receiving the number one pick in the NBA draft. Tanking is associated with multiple problems in relation to the treatment of season ticket holders that have paid to watch the team for the season without full knowledge of the team’s ‘strategy’, distortion to betting markets which can have significant financial implications, detrimental effects on team moral and the creation of a losing culture within the organisation. 

However, the power of perverse incentives in the NBA is even greater than other sports leagues given that the NBA is considered a star dominated league where an exceptional player has the ability to transform a franchise from no-hopers to championship contenders. Of course, the opposite is also true – when a star player leaves the fortunes of the team often leave with them. Case in point: Lebron James.

• Lebron James was drafted as the number one overall pick in the 2003 NBA draft by his hometown team, the Cleveland Cavaliers. He led Cleveland to their first playoffs in eight years and their first ever NBA finals in 2007.
• In 2010, Lebron left the Cavs and ‘took his talents to South Beach’ by joining the Miami Heat. Following James’ departure, the Cavs had the worst record in the entire NBA over the next four seasons (97–215).
• In 2014, Lebron returned to Cleveland and transformed the team from the worst to one of the best teams in the NBA, leading the team to three straight NBA championship finals and winning the city's first professional sports title in 52 years.
• In 2018, ‘King’ James left once again but this time to Los Angeles Lakers and the Cavs winning record left with him. This season, the Cavs have the third worst record in the entire league (11-41).

As such, given a team’s success can often be determined by one player there will always be perverse incentives at play in the NBA, particularly in the case of tanking for the number one pick. However, winning the number one pick in the draft should not be considered a strategic panacea for NBA teams as traditionally selectors have found it very difficult to identify individual talent that will develop in star NBA players.