The Economics of Sport
  • Sports Economics
  • About
  • Workshop
  • Media
  • Selected Publications
  • Book Reviews
  • A Primer on Gaelic Games
  • Upcoming Events
  • Education
  • Resources & Links
  • Data

Swimming Instruction And Pay

30/3/2022

 
By Robbie Butler

I am at a stage in my life where my time outside of work is largely taken up by trips to U6 Gaelic Football, U6 hurling, U7 soccer and swimming lessons. These are packed around a tight schedule and involve relatively short trips to various sports facilities in our locality. I even coach the soccer team.

When I was a child most of these activities did not start until one reached maybe 9 or 10 years of age. It is about half that age now. Another notable change is the registration fee. All four - as one would expect - charge a fee to join. When I was a child it was almost unheard of that one would pay to represent a team in a field sport. It was (I think) culturally unacceptable to ask an underage player to pay to play GAA or soccer. In contrast, swimming lessons, were run through our school and the cost was about £10-£12 in total. It was expected that one would pay for access to the pool and the labour cost of instructors.

Today things are different for hurling, Gaelic football and soccer. All of these codes now charge a membership fee, with the price covering the season of play. Swimming is charged on a monthly basis. The cost of swimming for one month is about the same as the annual cost of any one of the three field sports. Again, this cost differential is down to the costs of hiring and running the pool and the cost of hiring staff. Average Swimming Instructor hourly pay in Ireland is €15 per hour. Parents expect instructors to be paid and instructors expect to be compensated for their time and expertise. The market works. Lessons are in huge demand.

But why don't we pay GAA or soccer coaches? It is not expertise or training. I have almost a lifetime of experience playing soccer and a growing number of coaching qualifications. I am sure the same is true of hurling and GAA coaches. Is this a modern example of not treating the field sports like swimming (no registration fee in the 1980s) that will change in time?

My experience tells me if field sports coaches (like soccer or hurling) looked to be paid the answer would be (at best) a polite "no". You do this for the greater good and "love of the club". Rather than being paid, it costs these volunteers to coach; both in money and, more importantly, time. Hence the annual fee for field sports is less than 10% that of swimming.

People I speak to often comment that swimming lessons are "very expensive". Maybe they are. Or maybe hurling, GAA and soccer are just very cheap because of social norms and the expectations of coaching and giving up ones time. 

WSL Balance

28/3/2022

 
By David Butler

Yesterday, Chelsea woman went to Leicester and won 9-0.  Adjusted pre-match odds gave Chelsea an ~89% chance of success. While results like this are rare in the WSL, it made me think about balance in Women’s football.
​
Below is kernel density plot of a Theil index for the WSL using adjusted betting odds for 108 matches this season – this index can capture match-level balance, with greater values indicating more competitive contests. In this case, it ranges from 0.04 (uncompetitive matches such as above) to 1.30 (competitive matches).

The bimodal distribution with the two distinct peaks indicates the blend of balanced and imbalanced matches in the WSL this season. Keep in mind that this may relate to the structure of the odds, and I am assuming betting markets are efficient.
Picture

Cheltenham Tipster Returns 2022

21/3/2022

 
By David Butler

Just like last year, I followed the tipsters for the 2022 Cheltenham festival.  The table below shows the performance (profit/loss) of the traditional newspapers and recognised online tipping sources who made regular predictions.

Non-runner predictions were excluded from the analysis and a hypothetical stake of €10 (win) was assumed on the starting price of each prediction.

The results do not make for pleasant reading for the Tipsters. Only one tipster – Lambourn – returned a profit (€37.5).  This was due to the performance of Maries Rock, who won at 18/1.

The losses are a reminder of how challenging it is to make money at Cheltenham when gambling on every race – some of the handicaps are very challenging. Added to this, the changing ground conditions may have made it particularly tricky this year. It is also a keen reminder of the limits of tipsters ability. 
​
If one was to view the Cheltenham experience as a consumption good and accept losses maybe the numbers are justifiable. Taking the worst case scenario, if one was to follow The Sun tips for the 4 days, it would mean paying ~€50 per day for the entertainment. Of course, the product could be found cheaper elsewhere – you could have ‘bought’ the Cheltenham experience for as low as €4.30 per day by following the RP ratings.  
Picture

Ukraine

14/3/2022

 
By Robbie Butler

One can only imagine what life is like in Ukraine today. The events of the past three weeks have been truly shocking and demonstrate how fragile peace in Europe can be. Let's not forget, two European civil wars in the 20th century ended in global conflict. Maybe this is the reason why events in Ukraine are striking such a cord with so many ordinary Europeans. 

Sport also has a role to play. Yesterday West Ham's  Ukrainian winger Andriy Yarmolenko scored in the Premier League against Aston Villa. Various other Ukrainian players also play in the Premier League. They remind us how interconnected the European continent now is.

And the links go even further. Ukraine has been very much central to European football over the past decade or so. Shakhtar Donetsk won the Europa League in 2008/09, while Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk were defeated in the final in 2014/15.

It is not yet 4 years since Liverpool played in Ukraine. Supporters travelled in their thousands to the Olimpiyskyi National Sports Complex in Kyiv to see the Champions League Final versus Real Madrid. Gareth Bale and Loris Karius will be remembered, for very different reasons, on the night. One can again, only imagine what it must be like around this stadium today. 

And just 10 years ago, Ukraine were about to co-host Euro 2012 with Poland. Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Donetsk all hosted games.

England were defeated by Italy on penalties in the Quarter Finals in Kyiv. That Pirlo chip on Joe Hart comes to mind. Spain would later demolish the Italian's in the final in the same stadium. So on the night of the 1st of July 2012, Spain and Read Madrid goalkeeper Iker Casillas lifted the Henri Delaunay Trophy over his head into the night sky of Kyiv. 

New Designs

11/3/2022

 
​By David Butler

Most likely in light of the botched Super League breakaway, UEFA are shaking up the format of European competitions from the 2024/25 season. There will now be single league made up of 36 competing clubs.

Teams will no longer play three opponents in reverse fixtures. Instead they will now face fixtures against 10 different teams, half at home and half away. Under the new format, teams will play four matches more than the present structure.

There will be extra places with a failsafe to keep the big clubs sweet in case they have an underwhelming domestic season – 2 extra slots are available to the two clubs with the highest club coefficients that have not qualified automatically for the Champions League’s league stage, but have qualified either for the Champions League qualification phase or the Europa League/the Europa Conference League.

From a commercial perspective this reorganization means a greater inventory of fixtures to offer broadcasters. UEFA are also claiming that “the new format should mean that there is more to play for right up until the final night of league action”.

From a player welfare/managerial perspective, the extra matches will likely not be  welcomed. Take a player contracted to a Premier League team, or another club in a twenty-team domestic league. The season will be now a minimum of 4,320 minutes assuming a player does not reach the later stages of the UEFA competition. Also, that figure is outside domestic cup competitions.  Given that the clubs in these elite competitions tend to have cup runs domestically, the potential minutes to play will probably be closer to ~5,000. Already big clubs have sizable rosters and rotate a lot - I can see a day where big clubs will almost have two versions of themselves, one competing domestically and another in European competitions.  

Is the economics of sport just an externality?

9/3/2022

 
By John Considine
Picture
Last week there was a conversation amongst three of the contributors to this blog about video assisted refereeing (VAR).  One of the participants said they would prefer that the team they follow/support lost without VAR than won as a result of a VAR intervention.  It was probably an overstatement.  The same participant then pointed out that they did not want sport to become a science.  This reminded me of a 2021 European Sports Management Quarterly article called "Sport is Not an Industry".  It is worth a read.

One section of the article is titled "Is it really all about the money?".  Another section is titled "Sport is not its externalities".  In that section there are many sentences reflecting the sentiments expressed in the above paragraph.  Here are some.  "... sport is not performed for its externalities.  It has a meaning of its own that is the basis for it being performed. ... At the end of the day, the backbone of sport is not its externalities, not the products, but the athletes and the practice community to which they belong.  I'm not sure their primary legitimation for investing so much of their lives in sport ."

Of course, it is possible to view sport through an economics, sociology, or management lens.  The author, Hallgeir Gammelsaeter, is guilty to some extent of doing something similar.  The full title of the article is "Sport is Not an Industry: bringing sport back to sport management".  But the value of the article is the statements about the essence of sport.  Another sentence that particularly took my fancy was "We do not ask our 6-year-old if they want to work in the sports industry".

We can enjoyably engage in the study of sport, e.g. the economics of sport, and it could even be part of our employment.  We can enjoyably engage in the consumption of the sporting performances of athletes.  But these are at least one step removed from the reason sport exists.

Is Illan Meslier the Most Underrated Keeper in the Premier League?

7/3/2022

 
By Daragh O'Leary

Pep Guardiola recently garnered attention online when defending his £100 million signing Jack Grealish after being asked about Grealish’s underwhelming goal and assist tally for Man City this season. The City boss stated, “There are players that make the team play good when they are not in the statistics.”. The sentiment behind this point will not be lost on anyone who plays Fantasy Football. There are often players who are integral to their team but are not flattered by traditional performance metrics and thus don’t earn a lot of points. N'golo Kante for example has a goal per game score of just 0.06, but there are very few football fans that watch him would argue he isn’t a vital player for Chelsea.

For this post I want to focus on a player who I think is possibly one of the most underrated defensive assets in the Premier League because his performances don’t generate impressive traditional statistics, Illan Meslier. The young French goalkeeper is currently playing in a struggling Leeds United side languishing towards the bottom of the table. The poor performance of his team and their current dismal goal difference of -31 is definitely not flattering the twenty-two-year-old, but I think this is due to the sporting media’s over concentration on traditional defensive metrics like clean sheets and save percentage. The issue with using clean sheets as a proxy for a goalkeeper’s performance is that it is an imperfect measure of individual ability. For a keeper to win a clean sheet there are a number of variables which need to accompany his own individual performance such as the performance of his back four, the retention of possession by his midfield, and the finishing ability/inability of opposition he faces.
​
Meslier only has 3 clean sheets so far this season after 26 games (joint lowest in the league). In addition to this he has the 2nd worst save percentage in the league (60.9%). While most would argue that’s pretty poor for a keeper, the context of the games Meslier has to play in can shed light on why he is undervalued. Meslier may have the 2nd worst save percentage in the Premier League but as the graph below shows, he is also the most tested keeper in the league (161), and also somehow has more saves (98) than any other keeper in the Premiership.

Picture
Usually, statisticians would advocate the normalising of data and insist on reporting saves made in terms of percentage rather than nominal terms. This is because it allows for a like-for-like comparison of every keeper in the league. However, by doing this very thing you also ignore the contextual differences between the matches keepers have to play in. Many football fans regard Man City’s Ederson as one of the best keepers in the league because he has a very good save percentage (71%) and the most clean sheets of any keeper in the league (16). However, it is important to keep in mind that he also plays behind one of the best back fours and midfields in the league and is the 4th least tested keeper in the Premiership facing just 60 shots compared to Meslier’s 161. Additionally, Ederson plays in a team which completely dominate possession when they play and as a result opponent teams tend to resort to long range shots as possession closer to City’s goal is harder to come by.

Illan Meslier seems to be a keeper who is undervalued much in the same way current Arsenal keeper Aaron Ramsdale was when he signed for the Gunners. Most people thought Arsenal were mad to pay so much money for a goalkeeper who had been relegated in each of his previous two seasons with Bournemouth and Sheffield United. Since arriving at the Emirates though Ramsdale has thoroughly impressed both his club and national coach by earning the number one spot at Arsenal and his first senior cap for the English national team. The reason Ramsdale was undervalued was because he played in two very poor teams and as a result was tested more rigorously than other keepers. Now that he is playing behind an improved back four and midfield, traditional performance metrics seem to flatter him where they couldn’t before. I’d wager that a move to an improved side would show Meslier to be far better a keeper than most would think he is currently.

*The statistics for this post are valid as of 04/03/2022.

An Analysis of the Efficiency of Greyhound Racing Betting Markets

3/3/2022

 
By Bill Gaine

Bill is currently completing an MSc by Research at University College Cork.

Greyhound racing is an organised, competitive sport where six greyhounds run around an oval track to pursue a mechanical hare. Dogs wear jackets like jockey silks to help differentiate the dogs  in running. It is a sport of speed and at a full flight greyhound can run up to 43mph.

My research applies the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) to anecdotal evidence from greyhound racing. EMH states that asset prices reflect all available information (Downey, 2021). A direct implication is that it is impossible to "beat the market" consistently on a risk-adjusted basis since market prices should only react to new information (Fama, 1970).

A longstanding anecdotal belief in greyhound racing is that a dog placed in Trap Four (of the six possible traps) is the "coffin trap" (Martin, 2007). This is because greyhounds have different running styles:  some like to run on the inside, close to the rails, while others—known as wide runners—like to be on the outside, clear of the other dogs. 

The racing manager draws a railer in trap one, two or three and a wide runner in trap five or six. However, unless a dog in trap four is lucky or superior, it may find itself impossibly sandwiched between two thick chunks of greyhound and unable to run to its ability. This implies that being drawn in Trap 4 reduces the greyhound's chance of winning. The current study investigates if there is an empirical basis for this anecdotal belief.

Does a greyhound who draws Trap Four has less chance of success than if they were drawn in another trap?
 
A direct implication of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is that it is impossible for any person gambling on races to "beat the market" consistently (Davies, 2016). If market prices are formed on a risk-adjusted basis, prices should only react to new information (Angelini, Angelis and Singleton, 2021). Therefore, if bookmakers priced betting markets fairly, all outcomes should total 100%. However, bookmakers factor an "overround" into their odds which is the practice of factoring profit-margin into odds; this is best displayed as a percentage (TimeForm, 2021). Typically, in U.K. greyhound racing, this is around 126% of the market price, so bookmakers factor 26% profit into each race.
 
Whether or not market prices factor in a race's "Trap 4" element is unexplored in academia. However, betting systems exist, and bettors in sister sport horse racing have attempted to try and beat the market by using data from sources like racing forms to "handicap" races (Hausch, Ziemba and Rubinstein, 1981). Technical systems require less information and only use current betting data bettors attempt to find inefficiencies in the "market" by betting on "overlays" with a positive expected value (Hausch, Ziemba and Rubinstein, 1981).
 
This research is timely as; betting markets have evolved rapidly in the past ten to fifteen years due to rapid improvements in technology. Thus, areas for academic inquiry are continually growing. Betfair's ability to "lay" along with "make" bets is one of the most fundamental changes in betting in recent years. Traditionally, punters only bet on positive outcomes, e.g., winning a race, whereas today, laying is possible. Laying refers to punters engaging in bets where they want a negative result, e.g., a loser.
 
Accessing data from more than 80,000 individual races in 2018, this study will incorporate greyhound racing into the growing academic discourse on betting markets, and empirically test EMH. A update of results will follow in early summer 2022.

References
Angelini, Giovanni & De Angelis, Luca & Singleton, Carl. (2022). Informational efficiency and behaviour within in-play prediction markets. International Journal of Forecasting. 38. 282-299. 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2021.05.012.

Davies, A., 2022. Traders' 'gut' feelings separate man from machine - study. [online] www.reuters.com. Available at: <https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-research-traders-idUKKCN11O0ZM> [Accessed 24 February 2022].

Downey, L., 2021. Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). [online] Investopedia. Available at: <https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/efficientmarkethypothesis.asp> [Accessed 24 February 2022].

Fama, E. F. 1970. 'Efficient capital markets: a review of theory and empirical work.' Journal of Finance 25, 383-417.

Hausch, Donald & Ziemba, William & Rubinstein, Mark. (1981). Efficiency of the Market for Racetrack Betting. Management Science. 27. 1435-1452. 10.1287/mnsc.27.12.1435.

Martin, J., 2007. No sense in the middle ground. [online] independent. Available at: <https://www.independent.ie/sport/horse-racing/no-sense-in-the-middle-ground-26272431.html> [Accessed 24 February 2022].

TimeForm, 2021. Overround Explained | What is Bookmaker Margin? | Timeform. [online] Timeform.com. Available at: <https://www.timeform.com/betting/advanced/overround-explained> [Accessed 17 December 2021].

    Archives

    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013

    About

    This website was founded in July 2013.

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    American Football
    Athletics
    Baseball
    Basketball
    Behavioural Economics
    Boxing
    Broadcasting
    Competitive Balance
    Cricket
    Cycling
    Darts
    David Butler
    Declan Jordan
    Drugs
    Ed Valentine
    Epl
    Esports
    Expenditure
    F1
    Fifa World Cup
    Finances
    Funding
    Gaa
    Gaelic Games
    Gambling
    Game Theory
    Gary Burns
    Geography
    Golf
    Greyhound Racing
    Guest Posts
    Horse Racing
    Impact Studies
    John Considine
    John Eakins
    League Of Ireland
    Location
    Media
    Mls
    Mma
    Olympics
    Participation
    Paul O'Sullivan
    Premier League
    Regulation
    Research
    Robbie Butler
    Rugby
    Simpsonomics
    Snooker
    Soccer
    Spatial Analysis
    Sporting Bodies
    Stephen Brosnan
    Swimming
    Taxation
    Teaching
    Technology
    Tennis
    Transfers
    Uefa
    Ufc
    World Cup
    Wwe

Related

The website is not formally affiliated to any institution and all of the entries represent the personal views and opinions of an individual contributor. The website operates on a not-for-profit basis. For this reason we decline all advertisement opportunities. 

Contact

To contact us email sportseconomics2013@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @SportEcon.