By Robbie Butler,

This blog/website was launched in July 2013. Not long after Tokyo, Japan was awarded the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. Two of the very first posts I ever wrote focused on this and can be found here and here. In the second post from September 2013 I say:

       "A projected cost of $8 billion by the Japanese seems way too conservative.  An examination of recent past games would suggest, a figure of $15 billion to $18 billion is more likely to represent the true cost of the games. Eight years is a long time to wait but watch this space…"

As we know all too well, the Games were postponed in 2021 until this summer. By last year the cost of the Games had risen from the original $8 billion to $12.6 billion. No surprise there for anyone that has read any past literature on the topic. 

The delay in. the Games to this summer has not helped and has cost both Tokyo and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) money. A recent study by the University of Oxford estimates that the Toyko Games could now cost almost $16 billion.

And it could get worse. Those in favour of hosting such mega-events often point to the economic gains that can be made. Sure, these exist, but they are often in the private domain. The 'public gain' is found in the net increase in tourist arrivals which generates welfare effects from additional consumption and tax revenue. If recent reports emerging from Japan are correct, there may be an outright ban on foreign tourist arriving for the Games due to Coivd-19, thus eliminating one of the single biggest benefits in the public domain.  

if the Games are attended by Japanese fans only, there will be substitution effects but little or no income effects. It is simply the replacement of one purchase (a ticket to watch track events) with another (an endless list of alternatives). Japan might be on-course to record one of the single biggest public losses on any Summer Games if this is the case. Not that the revenue generated from foreign arrivals could go anywhere near the $16 billion costs to date, but it could close this gap by $3bn-$5bn potentially. 

Such evidence is now overwhelming and needs to be kept in mind for future suitors. 

by Declan Jordan

​Last week it was announced that UK and Ireland would bid to host the 2030 FIFA World Cup. There were mixed reactions in Ireland. Some see it as a waste of money or simply a political stunt.

I was asked to contribute to a piece in the Sunday Times Ireland. This is here, but it is behind a paywall. 

Andrew Zimbalist also contributed and was quoted as saying that while promises of enduring positive impacts are not borne out by previous experiences, there are few downsides in this bid for Ireland. He says "assuming that only existing stadiums will be used and that no hospitality or transportation infrastructure will be required, then other than some disruption there will be few downsides".

Of course we need to be be careful that the pork barrel approach of many enterprising local politicians and grasping county boards of the GAA that see this as a chance to develop regional stadiums (for examples, see comments here about Semple Stadium in Thurles and Casement Park in Belfast).

The following is the basis of my contribution to the Sunday Times article.

 I think the proposal for Ireland to join a bid with the UK countries is potentially quite positive. While the FIFA World Cup is a much bigger tournament than the rugby World Cup, for which Ireland recently unsuccessfully bid, Ireland would be a smaller element of a larger 2030 football world cup bid and so is much more sensible than trying to secure the entire rugby World Cup and the infrastructure and stadium development that would have entailed.
 
The 2030 World Cup will have an expanded 48 teams and 80 matches. The US-Canada-Mexico World Cup in 2026 will have 3 venues in Canada, 3 in Mexico, and 10 in the US. Ireland’s element of the proposal for the 2030 World Cup is likely to be limited to the Aviva Stadium and Croke Park, if it is made available by the GAA. None of the stadiums in the 2026 tournament is less than 45,000 capacity and the work that would be involved in upgrading the stadiums outside of Dublin would not be worthwhile.
 
With two stadiums in Dublin, one in Cardiff, and two or three in Glasgow/Edinburgh, this would leave England to provide 10 stadiums. This is not a big stretch based on the current stadium capacities of the Premier League clubs. Including Northern Ireland as a venue makes sense because of the narrative that can be built around a bid and linking it to the peace process, but the cost would be prohibitive. It would mean essentially building a new stadium in Northern Ireland that would remain mostly empty otherwise.
 
This means a bid would not require significant stadium investment. The infrastructure is already largely in place to move fans between host cities. Dublin is already very well serviced with flights to England and ferry travel can be scaled up relatively easily. The tournament would be far more compact than others, such as the 2026 world cup with venues across North America and Mexico. A UK-Ireland tournament would be more compact than the likely rival bids, with the exception of Morocco, the losing bid for 2026. The carbon footprint of a UK-Ireland tournament - with more European teams attending and smaller travel distances between venues (with less air travel) - would be lower than the competing bids. This would particularly be the case relative to a bid from Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
 
England seem to be reaching out to the other UK countries and Ireland to overcome the weaknesses in its disastrous bid for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The inclusion of the Irish, Welsh, and Scots may soften the attitudes towards the English in the global football community.
 
A lot of the issues with the rugby World Cup bid need to be addressed though. These involved the lack of transparency in the bid and the basis for the projected economic benefits. These cost-benefit analyses are notorious and can really be designed to provide whatever outcome is needed. There are some things to watch out for though. The first is on the benefits to tourism numbers. Tournaments like these of course bring in fans to watch the games. This has to be offset  against the displacement of typical tourists who will avoid Ireland while the tournament is on – whether to avoid the disruption of sharing the space with football fans or because they cannot secure accommodation. There was a decrease in international visitors to the UK in the summer of 2012 despite the London Olympics. A boost to the tourism industry is possible where these fans stay for longer and spend more than typical tourists.
 
The supply of accommodation is relatively fixed. This means if the hotels are already at capacity without a tournament there is no boost to the sector from more visitors – they are simply replacing the ones that are “already there” – except through higher prices.
 
It is important that these factors are considered in the analysis that supports a bid. We need to avoid over-promising and generating unrealistic economic benefits from poor analysis.
 
There is less risk attached to this proposal from Ireland’s perspective, with more modest likely benefits. Perhaps the best approach for the FAI and the Irish government would be to avoid making heroic claims about legacy effects and massive tourism boosts and instead to acknowledge that this is about spending on short-term benefits of the feel good factor and having a “party”. If the Irish team manage to qualify then it would be a month to remember for everyone. This would be more honest.

by Declan Jordan

​Just over 40 years ago my hometown football club had one its biggest games. Limerick United played Real Madrid in the European Cup in October 1980. The ‘home’ game was moved to Dublin in a vain attempt to raise some extra money. It turned out to be a bad idea, as only 6,000 people turned up to see the part-timers lose 2-1 against a late goal and a very suspect penalty. We also had a goal disallowed, but we are not holding on to it too much.
 
For Irish football fans the days of attracting big clubs for European fixtures are now very rare. Shamrock Rovers played AC Milan earlier this season in the Europa League, but typically our clubs now are more likely have early round games against clubs from other lesser leagues.
 
These games came about because the European Cup used to be a competition between European league champions. Now it is a much bigger competition with the larger leagues now having up to four qualifiers. The teams from the big leagues are seeded so they are kept away from clubs in less illustrious leagues in the earlier rounds.
 
I think it is clear that the inclusion of more teams from the stronger leagues has improved the quality of the competition and we see much better games, particularly in the knock-out stages. The television viewer cannot complain and the Champions League is arguably the best club competition in the world.
 
However, as a supporter of a team in a less fashionable league I do also have a sense of the loss of these big occasions for fans like me.
 
There is also the implication for balance in the competition. Allowing more big clubs into the competition should mean that more clubs have a better chance of winning, since it is not necessary to win the domestic league to qualify. What we might also expect though is that the number of different countries producing winners may decrease, as more qualifiers from the stronger leagues, and the more forgiving move away from straight knockout, favour the better (and richer) countries.
 
The table below shows the number of different clubs and the number of different leagues that have won, lost the final, and lost a semi-final in the Champions League compared to the European Cup experience over a similar time period.
 
It is important to note that one of the strongest leagues (England) had no representatives in the European Cup from 1985 to 1990 after the Heysel tragedy. This gap does not change the different number of countries that won the European Cup, though it is interesting to note that no English team featured in a semi-final from the Liverpool defeat at Heysel in 1985 until Manchester United lost in the then Champions League the 1996/7 season.

​The table shows that the number of clubs that have won or reached the last four of the Champions League from 1993 to 2020 is lower than the corresponding number of number of clubs that won the European Cup over the same time period (1964 to 1992).  This difference is even more pronounced in the last 10 years relative to the final 10 years of the European Cup.
 
It is also the case that we have seen fewer leagues represented in the final four places of the Champions League.
 
This has been particularly noticeable in the last 10 years. Since the 2010/11 season only five clubs from three leagues have won the tournament – Bayern, Liverpool, Chelsea, Barcelona, and Real Madrid. More remarkably, only five leagues have been represented in the finals (adding in PSG and Juventus) and six leagues when we drop down to include semi-finalists (Ajax). This means the last four places have been monopolised by the top 6 leagues (Spain, England, Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands).
 
Compare this to the final places in the last 10 years before the establishment of the Champions League. There 9 winners in 10 seasons – Hamburg, Liverpool, Juventus, Steaua, Porto, PSV, Milan, Red Star, and Barcelona. Eighteen different leagues had teams in at least the semi-finals.
 
I should note that I have used the current nations in the analysis – so that winners before 1989 that played in the Soviet and Czechoslovakian league are counted as Russian, Ukrainian, Cezh or Slovakian as appropriate. This turned out to be a minor issue as, for example, no East German teams featured and only Sebrian teams featured for Yugoslavia.
 
Allowing more teams from the stronger leagues is associated with greater concentration of success, at club and league levels. For the stronger, and richer, leagues in Europe this may very well be a feature rather than a bug.

By Daragh O'Leary

A phrase that I’ve always liked is demography is destiny. The phrase is attributed to French sociologist and philosopher Auguste Comte. The idea behind the saying is simple enough, the shape of the population shapes the population’s future. In his book The Demographic Cliff, Harry Dent Jr. describes how demographics can impact on future levels of economic activity. He gives many examples of how generations with proportionately high birth rates go on to increase economic activity a disproportionate amount 20 or 30 years after their births. The book got me thinking about whether or not this could be applied to the case of sport, specifically soccer, in Ireland.

If you look at the ages of players in national football teams you can see that most are in their 20s. A few veterans will be in their early 30s but as a rule of thumb, international soccer is a young man’s game. This means that when a footballer is born it will take them around 20 odd years before they go on to represent their national team. The Irish men’s national team reached their first ever major tournament in 1988 which means that we would be looking at the birth rates for Irish males in the mid to late 1960s. Coincidentally, this period of time just happens to be an era of high births rates for Irish males. By 1963, Irish male births had reached levels similar to the baby boom period in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The number of male births in Ireland continued to increase upwards from the 1960s up until 1980 where it peaked at 38,267. It seems suspicious that the most fertile period for male births was from the early 1960s to 1980 and Ireland also just happened to begin qualifying for major international tournaments in the very late 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Around the time when these players would be coming of age. 

This is illustrated in the below graph which shows the number of Irish males born in blue and the years the Irish national men’s team played in a major international tournament in green from 1950-2019. 

It seems noteworthy that from 1980 onwards Ireland’s number of male births declined considerably. In fact, in 1987 Ireland hits as low as 29,931 male births which is lower than the trough period just before the 1960s. Ireland failed to qualify for major tournaments in 2006, 2008, and 2010 as the generation which brought them their most success on the football pitch started to age. There was a brief resurgence in participation at major tournaments in the 2012 and 2016 Euros which could have been as a result of the brief plateau in male births in the late 1980s before it began its really heavy decline into the 1990s.This decline continues until it hits rock-bottom in 1994 at just 24,957 male births. It seems extremely telling that if we were to move forward roughly 20 years from this rock-bottom period for male births it would bring us up to around the current day Irish team which has failed to qualify for the last two major international tournaments. The current team’s stock of available players is so low they seem to be increasingly relying on older players or players born in different populations which qualify to play for Ireland and choose not to play for their birth country.

It seems demographic change has quite a decent level of explanatory power over Irish sporting success. Now it does have to be said that demographic change seems to offer little explanation for Ireland’s poor participation in major international tournaments up until 1988. This is most likely as a result of the famous ban which the GAA had in place on foreign sports up until 1971. This meant that people who played non-Irish sports like soccer would have been banned from playing our national sports like hurling and Gaelic football. It is very likely that this may explain Ireland’s lack of participation in major soccer tournaments up to this stage. None the less demographic change seems to explain Irish success fairly well from the 1980s on.
​
Lastly, it should be noted that there is no way this demographic change could predict Ireland’s success on the pitch exactly. Historical demographic change can only give us an indication as to the era in which we may be most likely to qualify for a major tournament because we will have a relatively larger stock of potential players to pick from. Considering this, it seems a relatively safe bet that the Irish men’s team will start to improve toward the end of this decade and go on to qualify for the 2030 World Cup and the 2032 Euros, which will both take place just over 20 years after the record high number of 38,682 male births set in 2008.  COYBIG!

By Robbie Butler

Unfortunately, due to the on-going public health situation, it has been decided to delay the 12th ESEA Conference in Helsinki, Finland for another year (until 2022).

This means that the arrival of the conference at University College Cork, originally planned for 2021, but delayed until 2022, has now been delayed for another year until August 2023.

The next three events are therefore as follows:

• 12th ESEA Conference on Sport Economics – Online Conference hosted by Bielefeld University, Germany 25th August – 27th August 2021
• 13th ESEA Conference on Sport Economics – Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland from 24th to 26th August 2022.
  
• 14th ESEA Conference on Sport Economics – University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. August 2023 (dates to be confirmed).