By Robbie Butler

As expected, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola wasn't too pleased to see Manchester United win their first trophy in six seasons at the weekend. Speaking to the media, Guardiola cited United's spending on players since 2017/18 and said "Sooner or later it should happen, shouldn’t it?."

Referring to their spending the City manager went on to say "It's normal, they're in the position they normally should be. The reality is that two teams, Liverpool and ourselves, have done incredibly well in the numbers".

Pep has a point too. Since United won the Europa League in 2017, the club has had a net spent of -£764.3. Over this time, other Premier League clubs have won 22 trophies at domestic, European and world club levels.

The data below below demonstrate just how expensive the EFL Cup has been for United and illustrates net spend per trophy won from the 2017/18 season to 2022/23, for the six successful clubs.

Of course, if more trophies follow, the price per trophy will rapidly decline. That will only become clearer as the season unfolds. 

By Robbie Butler

Each March I need to renew my car insurance. This week my quote arrived in the post and unsurprisingly the 2023 charge was €40 higher than 2022. This despite making no claim – loyalty is punished. A quick search of the internet and I found a different insurer at almost €80 cheaper. So, for the 6th time in 18 years, I have changed my car insurer.

In the same period, I have changed my phone provider just once, my television provider once and have never changed my health insurance provider.

Greater competition in the car insurance market helps, but there is competition, or at least the illusion of competition, in health, phone, and television markets, even if it is not as deep.

The key difference for me is the contract default.

At the end of the 12-month period with my car insurance, if I do nothing, the relationship with the insurance provider simply ends. So, to break-up, silence is all that is required from me. This is why I am on my 6th provider.

With the other utilities, as the annual renewal date approaches, I may be contacted (as is the case with health insurance) but if I do nothing, the cover simply roles over to the next year. Breaking up requires action from me.

Television subscription is even worse. I recently had a conversation with my provider as I sought to reduce my bill and was met with the phrase “Oh yeah, you can. You are out of contract”. But despite this being the case, to end the “contract” I was “out of”, considerable effort was required.

The same companies, often engage in asymmetric starting and termination processes. For example, it was possible to upgrade my television sports package online with a simple click. Termination, despite being “out of contract” required a phone call of more than 20 minutes (part on hold/part talking) and conversations with two people, and an “explanation”. Such practices should end.

If customers can buy online, termination must be permitted in the same fashion e.g., the same click of a button.
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If all utilities and subscriptions were forced to adopt the car insurance model – termination requires no action from the buyer – customers would generally be in a better place. People would switch providers more often, as the cost of changing would fall dramatically, and greater value for money would result.

By Robbie Butler

Prior to the ESEA Conference, the annual PhD Workshop will take place from the afternoon of Monday the 21st of August to Wednesday the 23rd of August.

This event will be led by Dr Alex Farnell (NUI Maynooth) in collaboration with the UCC team (Dr John Eakins, Dr David Butler and Dr Robert Butler) and Dr Katrin Scharfenkamp (Bielefeld).Interested PhD students who want to participate in the workshop can register on the conference webpage.  The provisional structure to the PhD workshop is below. Closer to the date, the lecturers will send an e-mail with the most up to date and detailed information to the workshop participants. If you plan to participate, please ensure to register for the conference and the PhD workshop. 

The workshop will see a focus on applied econometrics (based on PhD stage) and wider discussions on research idea development and handling submission outcomes. In addition, a special ‘meet the editors’ session will be held and students will get an opportunity to ask questions.  

MONDAY 21ST AUGUST 2023 
12.30 – 14.30   Registration – Local Organisers 
14.30 – 17.00   Meet-and-Greet, Introduction & Breakout Groups (Research Idea Formation) – Led by Dr Alex Farnell and Dr David Butler 
  
TUESDAY 22ND AUGUST 2023 
9.00 – 13.00    Applied Econometrics Classes (Early-Stage PhD and Later-Stage PhD) – Led by Dr Alex Farnell and Dr John Eakins 
13.00 – 14.30 Lunch 
14.30 – 16.30 Decision on Submission: Reflections on Rejection, Revisions & Acceptance – Led by Dr Alex Farnell and Dr David Butler 
16.30 – 17.30 Meet the Editors: Questions and Answers – moderated by Dr Robert Butler 
18.00 – 20.00 PhD Dinner   

WEDNESDAY 23RD AUGUST 2023 
9.00 – 12.00   Culminating Presentations & Conclusion – Led by Dr Alex Farnell and Dr Katrin Scharfenkamp 
12.00 – 13.00   Lunch 
14.00 – 15.30   ESEA Conference Registration 

​For specific questions related to the workshop please contact Dr Katrin Scharfenkamp (katrin.scharfenkamp@uni-bielefeld.de)

By Robbie Butler

Recently Liam Lenten and Graham Kendall published "Scholarly sports: Influence of social science academe on sports rules and policy" in the Journal of the Operational Research Society. The duo had previously collaborated in 2017 in the European Journal of Operational Research with "When sports rules go awry". The latter paper provides a really nice overview of rule changes, made across a wide variety of sports, that resulted in unintended consequences. 

Something related to this is at play in English football. Next weekend sees the first domestic silverware presented - the Carabao Cup Final. Manchester United will go head-to-head with Newcastle United. While the Red Devils are experiencing a trophy drought by their standards (the last success was the Europa League under Jose Mourinho back in 2017), Newcastle have not won a major trophy since 1995.

The interesting dynamic this weekend, centres on Newcastle United goalkeeper Martin Dúbravka. The Slovakian international was first choice goalkeeper at Newcastle from 2018 to 2022. At the start of the 2022/23 season he lost his place to Nick Pope. Rather than sit on the bench for Newcastle, Dúbravka decided to go out on loan. He destination - none other than Manchester United. 

His move had the same result. The subs bench. But this time for Man United. However, he did make two appearances for United, both in the Carabao Cup.

League rules stipulate that players cannot represent more than one club in the competition. When Dúbravka returned to Newcastle in January, following the end of his loan agreement with United, he was aware he could not represent Newcastle in the competition. Little did he know the clubs would meet in the final.

At full-time on Sunday, the winners (whoever that will be) will receive 30 medals. 19 are for players and 11 for staff. Dúbravka who will be part of the Newcastle group (he cannot be named in the squad) is eligible for a winners medal...but only if Manchester United win. So his medal haul can be added to, but only if his current club lose.

The man himself has made the situation clear however. He said yesterday "I played two games for Manchester United, so I knew that I can't play in the final...It’s a very strange situation for me...It will be very difficult to watch this game. I’ve been asked about it a lot, but of course I want Newcastle to win because I’ve spent so many years here and I’m very grateful for the chance the club gave me in English football".

By John Considine

Linesmen.  These were two soccer officials that ran along the sidelines of the field in line with the last defender (excluding the goalkeeper).  They were usually men and their main job was to raise a flag to signal if a player was in a position prohibited by the laws of the game.  Now the word, and the many of the human functions, are effectively obsolete.
 
As women started to perform the role, the “men” part was never going to survive in the 21st century.  If the Church of England are considering renaming the “Our Father” then “Linesmen” never stood a prayer.  The artists previously known as Linesmen became known as Assistant Referees.  Soon they will be replaced by symbols.  There are still two humans who perform a variation of the same physical acts.  They run, reason, and raise their flags.  But they don’t really matter.  They have been replaced by a higher power - a human who interprets images from cameras.  When it comes to important offside decisions the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) is all that matters.  Soon, even that human will no longer be needed – player location is a small problem compared to the location technology that is already used by driverless cars.  I regard such changes as progress.  Events of the last few days will hasten the demise of the human VAR.  Human error in the implementation of VAR might have costs Arsenal and Brighton two points each.
 
Since the introduction of VAR, and the change in guidelines to the two human assistant referees, there has been an 11.3% decrease in the number of offsides.  This number comes from a welcome addition to the growing research on VAR.  It is from a SSRN paper by Camilo Abbate, Jeffrey Cross and Richard Uhrig (the latter two authors have Journal of Sports Economics paper on the impact of Covid-19).  The SSRN paper uses observations from 35,183 games from the 16 top leagues.  It is primarily concerned with home-field advantage.
 
Like the humans patrolling the sidelines of soccer fields, the last paragraph of the SSRN paper raises a flag about a potential problem.  The flag relates to the conventional wisdom in sports economics that the (main?) channel for home-field advantage is referee bias.  Interpreting the lack of statistical support for referee bias, the authors say “One must consider the possibility that the observed disparities in various outcomes … are driven by the direct effect of fans on players rather than the referee”.  A worthy consideration.  Although the referee makes the ultimate adjudication on whether of not there is foul play, the play itself is the product of the players.  If there are human errors and biases, that arise as the result of mass psychology, then it is worth considering if they are the product of 22 biological machines rather than just one.

By David Butler

In football, the market for goalkeepers is exclusive. Recruiters tend not to invest equivalent transfer fees on goalkeepers relative to other positions and goalkeepers are also paid less than outfield players. But a relatively undisputed view is that first-rate goalkeepers are critical to team success - it seems paradoxical that fewer financial resources are dedicated to the position.

With colleagues internationally, we have begun to consider these issues and last week published a new paper on ‘Salary determination in professional football: empirical evidence from goalkeepers’ in the European Sport Management Quarterly.

In this paper, we test the determinants of goalkeeper pay and discuss if football clubs effectively separate goalkeeper performances from outfield players. Goalkeepers after all should be evaluated on their own performance, not on that of those around them.

We use a new goalkeeper salary dataset from Capology and match this with basic and advanced performance measures produced by Statsbomb.

What do we find?  Clubs use primitive defensive statistics to determine goalkeeper pay. Counter-intuitively, we fail to find evidence that goalkeepers who save more shots get paid more and goalkeepers are not remunerated for their direct defensive contributions. Team outcomes rather than goalkeeper performance seems to be critical to their pay, despite the presence of advanced stats that allow goalkeepers ability to be individually appraised such as post shot expected goals.
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Maybe the most interesting result is the importance of goalkeeper’s passing success for salary determination. The labour market rewards goalkeepers who are better than others at contributing to their team’s offensive moves – modern goalkeepers are now the first line of attack!

By David Butler

Over Christmas I got a chance to watch more football than usual. One innovation I spotted from Sky was how they now present Win Probabilities - powered by Oracle Cloud - as a match progresses. According to official website, these probabilities are calculated “using four years of match data, [and] shows the chance a team will win or draw by simulating the remainder of the match 100,000 times”

I was interested to see how the forecasts matched up with market odds. For the case below - Brentford vs Tottenham, I checked the betting markets the very second the win probabilities were presented by Sky.

There were differences. Controlling for the bookmakers take, there was ~18% chance of Brentford success. The bookies estimated a draw to have a ~55% chance and had a Tottenham win at ~27%. 

By Robbie Butler

The 14th European Sport Economics Association (ESEA) Conference will be held at University College Cork, Ireland from the 23rd to the 25th of August 2023.

We are delighted to announce the event will include a keynote address by Professor Alex Bryson of (IZA Institute of Labor Economics) University College London (UCL).

Prof. Bryson is Professor of Quantitative Social Science at UCL's Social Research Institute. He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in July 2014. He is also a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (London) and a Rutgers Research Faculty Fellow.

His research focuses on industrial relations, labour economics and programme evaluation. Prof. Bryson is Editor-in-Chief at Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society and an editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A and the Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership.

His sports economics work is widely read and cited. He has published papers on superstar effects, coaching performance and the impact of Covid-19 on sport, and is a member of the Erasmus Centre for Applied Sports Economics (ECASE) Scientific Board. Many of his papers are published in ABS 3* and ABS 4* journal, as well as the leading journal in our field, the Journal of Sports Economics.

​Those wishing to attend the conference should know that submissions are welcome relating to any area of sports economics including theoretical, empirical and conceptual papers.

Please submit an extended abstract including introduction, theoretical background, methods and major finding via the submission portal that can be found on the conference website: www.cubsucc.com/esea-call-for-papers.

Abstract submission deadline: 31st March 2023.
Notification of acceptance: 30th April 2023

Full information about Cork 2023 can be found on the event website: www.cubsucc.com/esea-home/

By John Considine

In late January, a game between Chelsea and Liverpool in the Women's Super League was abandoned after six minutes.  The decision to play the game on a frozen pitch seemed strange.  The various media outlet had a field day discussing the issue, e.g. here is Sky Sports' "The Football Show" discussing the issue.  There was growing support for the idea that WSL grounds needed undersoil heating.  Some of the contributions to the debate would have been at home in Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek.

In Trekonomics Manu Saadia discusses the difference between the virtual world of the space ship's holodeck and the real world.  Scarcity and trade-offs do not feature prominently in the holodeck.  You can build your own world.  Perfect grounds.  Perfect weather.  That is not the world faced by the WSL.  It is not even the world faced by the Premier League.  Resources are scarce.  A more consider view of the situation came from the Arsenal manager.  Jonas Eidevall said "We need to take good decisions on where the investment should be going to grow the game in the long term and I'm very doubtful that should be put into undersoil heating at the moment".  There are plenty of needs/wants and limited resources.  It is important that they are put to best use.