By Robbie Butler

Back in 2020 and in again 2022 I wrote about the emergence of Luton Town. The 2020 piece (here) contained the table aside showing how the club had experienced various promotions and relegations through the past 20 years.

On Saturday, the Luton story reached new heights as the club won the Championship Play-Off Final (Tier 2 of English football) and will next season play in the Premier League for the first time. 

The game was nostalgic for me as it brought together two teams that hold special places in my football memories. Coventry City were the first team I remember winning the FA Cup (1987) while Luton Town were the first club I remember winning the League Cup (1988). Coventry had spent some time in the Premier League in the 1990s and early 2000s, while Luton had been relegated from the top flight of English football the season before the Premier League started. They finished 3rd from bottom on 42 points, but were 2 points behind 17th placed Coventry City!

Having been outside of the Football League as recently as 2014, Luton Town's rise is remarkable. Four promotions since 2013/14 will see them next season play against clubs such as Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea. 

But football is a zero-sum game in many respects. There are many clubs right now that may consider themselves a "Luton Town" of ten years ago. In 2022, I mentioned Oldham Athletic. At the end of the 2021/22 season, the Latics became the first club to leave the Football League having once played in the Premier League - from 1992 to 1994. 

While Ryan Reynolds and co. were turning the National League into Holllywood this season via Netflix, Oldham were also competing in this league. The club finished 12th. Having been elected to the Football League at the end of the 1906/07 season, their 104th place finish in the pyramid of English football is the lowest ever.

But as I said last year "those involved should take some comfort from Luton Town. Anything is possible".

​The same continues to hold. Brighton and Hove Albion will play in the Europa League next season. In 1997 the club sold the Goldstone Ground (home stadium) to cover debts. Anything is possible. 

By John Considine

It seems to me that there is an increase in the number of published papers using NBA Last Two Minute reports.  These reports document the correctness of play-by-play calls and non-calls in the last two minutes of basketball games.  It means that one has four distinct classes: correct calls; correct non-calls; incorrect calls; and incorrect non-calls.  There is one major advantage of using incorrect calls and incorrect non-calls to examine referee bias.  They exclude player behaviour and, therefore, allow us focus on the decisions of the officials.
 
If the errors made by officials are statistically correlated with variables like race, height, nationality, star-status and so on, then we can suggest that the officials are biased.  A common thread in two 2023 papers is the testing of racial bias amongst referees.  An NBER working paper by Naci Mocan and Eric Osborne-Christenson finds racial bias for one subset of calls dependent on the racial make up of the referee crew and the players involved.  A Scientific Reports paper by Konstantinos Pelechrinis does not find support for racial bias – although this paper only examines a particular subset of the fouls.
 
The Pelechrinis paper is primarily concerned with home bias in the decisions of referees.  This is also the subject of a fine 2022 Journal of Sports Economics paper by Hua Gong.  The title of the paper is ‘The Effect of the Crowd on Home Bias: Evidence from NBA Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic’.  As the title suggests, this paper is like many others that seek to use the lack of crowds during the pandemic to identify how crowds might influence officials.  The evidence in this paper is that there is no referee bias in favour of home teams.
 
What I find more interesting is the error rate of officials.  The average percentage of incorrect calls is 3.9% and the average percentage of incorrect non-calls is 6.0%.  The higher rate of incorrect non-calls compared to incorrect calls is in keeping with the literature.  There may be a slight concern over conflict of interest in that these reports are generated by the NBA.  However, they are probably more informed than some of the crowd sourced “correctness” of calls data used in other papers.

By John Considine

This week Wembley was sold out for the Women’s FA Cup Final.  It was women competitors selling out what is probably the national arena in England.  At one stage it seemed like the national arena for Gaelic Games in Ireland, Croke Park, might have been the venue for a competition between two other female competitors.  For a variety of reasons, tomorrow's fight between Katie Taylor and Chantelle Cameron will not take place in Croke Park.  Therefore, we are left ponder what prices would have been charged for entry and whether these prices would have been designed to maximise profits or attendance.

We do have the prices for the 3Arena.  Prices.  There is more than one price for entry to most sports events.  The prices listed for the Taylor fight in the 3Arena are €80, €100, €140, €250, €500, €750, and €1,500 (VIP).  The relatively smaller venue allows for higher prices.

The prices listed on the Wembley Stadium website for access to the FA Cup final include £30, £25 and £15 for Category 1, 2 and 3, respectively.  In addition, there were other prices for Old Age Pensioners and Students (£10) and u16s (£5).  There were reduced per person prices if they purchased as groups.  There were tickets packaged with other benefits, e.g. £199 for the Diamond package.  Or a Private Box could be purchased for £237 per person.

There is no mention of prices for pensioners, students, or u16s for the 3Arena.  I’m not sure if these would have had price categories if the fight was taking place in the bigger Croke Park venue.

My guess is that Eddie Hearn, the boxing promoter, is best placed to select the venue and prices.  Practical knowledge based on experience.  Academic economists like to construct theoretical demand schedules that plot the relationship between prices that individuals are willing to pay at given quantities.  How many people would turn up to watch Katie Taylor if, there were no space constraints and, the price was a uniform €20?  At €30?  At €10?
 
There is a gap between theory and practice.  Before the turn of the century, a colleague of mine got a lesson on this point.  They got the department to pay for the production of over 200 course books that were to be sold at the cost of production.  The number ordered matched the number of students in the class.  The colleague only realised their error when not every student decided to purchase a course book.  There was some element of elasticity.  The same mistake was not made the following year.  There is a good chance Eddie Hearn selected the prices that were most likely to maximise profits.
 
Maybe in the not-too-distant future, Taylor will fight in Croke Park.  It will probably have to be pretty soon as she comes towards the end of her career.  It would be nice to see her sell out the venue.

By Robbie Butler

A new report, published today, states that the "estimated total direct and stimulated expenditure of the Irish Breeding and Racing industry in 2022" was €2.46 billion. 

The Horse Racing Ireland report, which was authored by Deloitte, also says that "estimated number of full-time equivalent (FTE) individuals in employment that can be related back to the Breeding and Racing industry in Ireland in 2022" was 30,350. 

The full report can be found here.  

By David Butler

​What makes sports fans curious to rewatch contests or watch when an outcome is known?  I’ve contemplated this question for a long time. Outcome uncertainty is removed, but the means in which that outcome unfolded is still unknown.

For a long time, football fans in the United Kingdom and Ireland have watched Match of the Day. This show began in August 1964, originally broadcasting live matches on BBC2 and has become a famous soccer highlights show. I can remember a time when it was actually possible to watch Match of the Day without knowing the scores of matches that took place earlier that Saturday – technological change has made this almost impossible now. With YouTube and other streaming services it is now possible to review football matches almost immediately after a match concludes. 

In a recent paper we consider ex-post demand, so we can look at motivators to watch when results are known. The full paper can be accessed here.

We followed the EPL game schedule on a rolling basis and extracted Sky Sports YouTube views in real-time prior to the start of a new game-week. We did this for 751 highlight reels on the Sky's Premier League YouTube channel over the 2019/2020 and 2020/21 seasons. In August 2019, Sky UK  widened their content options for non-subscribing consumers by hosting these highlights.

What do fans like to watch when outcomes are known? First, they prefer matches with shock outcomes. As expected, fans show less interest in football where the score line result is more predictable a priori. Also unsurprisingly, fans prefer to review matches with a higher expected goals – most likely indicating a better quality contest.
​
There are also some individual events taking place in matches that fans prefer. For example, matches with red cards, exceptional goals, bad mistakes and penalties all attract higher views. Finally, we find that fans like to review star players scoring.   

By Robbie Butler

As promised, some more on the GAA broadcasting debate that continues to rumble on.

The estimations below are just that – estimations. They are based on Championship games only and exclude the many other programmes and services one gets from a television and a sports subscription channel. They also exclude the cost of hardware e.g., television, laptop, etc. and the price of electricity or the internet. Sky Sports prices are calculated for a 4-month period, based on a standard charge. Contracts normally run for a minimum of 12 months; however promotional rates can apply in earlier months. This needs to be considered when interpreting the data. So instead of being a perfect representation of reality, the data are rather an attempt to show how monopolies and “competition” in this space have changed the landscape over time for viewers.

The movement of some broadcasting content to GAA Go presents two very contrasting scenarios, depending on how one consumes the content. 

For those that were willing and able to pay for the Season Pass, all 38 Championship games cost a total of €79 or “just over €2 per game” as GAA Go promotes. Added to the cost of an Irish television licence, this puts the cost per game at just under €3.50 with a total cost of €239.

If, however, one is not able to afford a once of fee of €79, and instead decided to consume these games individually (€12 per game), the total cost has never been as big - €616, while the cost per game even exceeds the Sky Sports era. And of course, Sky Sports Subscribers get access to every other sport on the service.

Just like the Premier League, the structural break arrives with the arrival of “competition”. Prices jump upwards. The more “competition” the higher prices seem to go as more subscription services are required. For more on this see Butler and Massey (2019).

There may also be a behavioural element at play in this current debate. If one compares the GAA to the Premier League, the latter’s pay-per-view model has failed spectacularly on two occasions. Once in the mid-2000s and once during Covid. Fans are happy to pay for the basic service (Sky Sports) but will not pay extra per game. It would seem that the public are happier that games are not broadcast at all (only those in the stadium get to watch) rather than having a pay-per-view option.
​
In Ireland the GAA basic service is essentially free-to-air television. The cost is the television licence. GAA Go is then essentially fulfilling the pay-per-view space once occupied in the UK and Ireland by PremPlus. It remains to be seen if the Irish experiment will go the same way as that across the Irish Sea.

By Robbie Butler

The issue of broadcasting and the GAA reared its head again at the weekend when Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin and former Cork All-Ireland winning goalkeeper and RTE GAA pundit Donal Óg Cusack both argued that all GAA (hurling) matches should be available on free-to-air television.

This is an emotive issue and one that goes to the heart of the GAA and all it represents.

For quite some time we have written about this and these posts from 2018, 2019 and 2021 touch on various issues to do with broadcasting and streaming of our national sport.

Just before Covid struck, I delivered a research seminar in UCC’s Skellig CRI Centre for Research and Innovation in Caherciveen, Co. Kerry. My presentation was called “The Evolution of Broadcasting in Gaelic Games”.

Like the 2018 post above, it addressed the evolution of GAA broadcasting, from the first television broadcast of a GAA match in 1962 to 2010. 2010 was a significant year because up until this point all games were available on free-to-air television in this country.

Since then, various subscription platforms have purchased content – Setanta Sports, Sky Sports, GAA Go – which has migrated behind the paywall.

Why this change? The 2016 GAA annual report to Congress can help explain it.

Then GAA Páraic Duffy said: “Any restriction that prohibits the GAA from engaging with all interested parties, including subscription TV providers, would seriously reduce our negotiating power and thus our ability to achieve the true worth of our assets, and would inevitably lead to a greatly reduced media-rights income. In what is already a small pool of potential broadcast partners, we must ensure the existence of a genuine market for our games and maintain the option of engaging with all interested parties, regardless of whether they are free-to-air or subscription providers. This flexibility and freedom is crucial if we are to nurture a competitive tender process and thus ensure that the GAA achieves the proper value for its rights."

At lot had changed in 20 years.

Back in April 1997 then President of the GAA, Jack Boothman, said: “The GAA can never in conscience decide to sell television rights to any media provider who will not be widely available throughout the country and which will not be national in character. We are not going to sell our people down the river for money.”

The movement towards more live broadcasts both on free-to-air television and subscription platforms has meant consumers pay more – both at a per match level and overall. For example, back in 1996 when just 14 games were shown – all free-to-air – the total cost to the GAA fan (television licence) was €137 (2020 prices) of just under €10 per game. In 2002 this dipped to just €4 per game. However, things changed post-2010. By 2014, and the arrival of Sky Sports, this had risen to more than €300 in total and more than €7 per game.

This is no surprise. Our 2019 paper demonstrates this at play in the English Premier League when ITV lost all live football to Sky Sports. However, this move has had a transformative effect on English football.

During his impassioned speech Cusack said “My nephew – my father told me lately – can name all of the Liverpool squad. I don’t think the young fella was ever in Liverpool. Why is that?”

I have the exact same situation in this house – a small person that can name the entire Liverpool squad. He has never been to Liverpool either. But this is not because Liverpool are on free-to-air television. Quite the contrary. It costs me €60 a month in subscription charges. He doesn’t know this of course but he gets to watch Liverpool once if not twice a week on live television.

There is be a follow-up post on this issue shortly.

By John Considine

It is half a century since Alex Leijonhufvud published "Life Among the Econ” in Economic Inquiry.  In this wonderful piece, the author pokes good-natured fun at the academics from various disciplines and sub-disciplines.  The various species of Econs are the main subject of the piece but Leijonhufvud does mention the neighbours from political science and sociology.  “Thus, in explaining to a stranger, for example, why he holds the Sociogs or the Polscis in such low regard, the Econ will say that ‘they do not make modls’ and leave it at that”.
 
Around the time that “Life Among the Econ” was published, Ireland’s current President was an academic in a Department of Political Science and Sociology.  Michael D. Higgins clearly has a low regard for the Econ (here).  I have no problem saying that our President’s criticism has some merit but it is vague and unimaginative.  I have no problem saying that I voted for him.  I have no problem saying that some of the best work on the history of economics is currently being done by Sociogs, e.g. Marion Fourcade’s criticism in her “The Superiority of Economists”.  However, we need more of the material like that produced by Leijonhufvud and Fourcade rather than Higgins.
 
There is an argument to be made that most social scientists are becoming O’Metrs.  The O’Metrs are the empirical folks in Leijonhufvud’s world.  The people who get their hands dirty by digging in the data for a living – although empirical economists also get some criticism from the author because of their “random strip-mining”.
 
Sport provides plenty of rich seams to be mined.  Economists, political scientists, sociologists, and other social scientists can dig successfully in the area.  For example, two Polscis have produced an excellent paper on home advantage.  Liam Kneafsey and Stefan Muller specifically examine gaelic games for home advantage.  They exploit the fact many gaelic games are played on neutral grounds.  They also exploit the superb GAA rankings produced by the political journalist Gavin Reilly.  These rankings, along with the combination of home and neutral ground games, allow Kneafsey and Muller to establish the size of home field advantage.  They find that Reilly’s stronger teams win home games 80 to 90 percent of the time.  This drops to 60 percent at neutral venues.
 
The Econs can learn a lot from the neighbours.

By John Considine

Why not require Jurgen Klopp to undertake, and pass, a course in refereeing?  If one wanted to go a little further then make him referee a couple of games at a level where other referees start out their career.  If it is good enough for a New Jersey Little League then maybe it is good enough for the Premier League.  The Little League is requiring abusive spectators to become umpires (here).
 
Education is a big part of sport and games.  Coaches require coaching badges to coach.  Qualifications are required of referees.  Those involved with kids teams have to take child protection courses.  Recently, agents have been required to undertake an examination of their knowledge.  Those who breach some codes of conduct are required to undertake appropriate education.  Why not do the same with those who repeatedly abuse referees?  Other sanctions don’t seem to work for repeat offenders.  Educate them by getting them to walk a mile in the referee’s shoes.
 
We delude ourselves into believing that we could do the job better than the managers, players, or referees.  The less likely we are to have our reality challenged the more deluded we become.  Aging ex-players, with fading memories of how they struggled at times, is the best example.  Then there are those who never experience the struggles and delude themselves behind the controls of a games console or keyboard.  How many of those who question the competence of a referee have taken control of a game?  An occasional dose of reality does us no harm.  Gary Neville was a much more balanced pundit after his spell as manager of Valencia.
 
The authorities tend to favour touchline bans and financial penalties.  The penalties tend to be larger for those earning more money from the game.  Klopp is likely to incur a larger financial penalty than those working in the lower reaches of English football would incur for a similar offense.  Klopp pays more because he can afford it.
 
The currency of a touchline ban is time.  Something that is more evenly distributed amongst individuals.  It may be more appropriate in amateur sport.
 
Gaelic games are classified as amateur sport.  These games also have their problems with abuse of referees.  Only last weekend did the referees in one region withdraw their services (here).
 
Financial and time penalties attempt to change behaviour rather than values.  While it is possible that the changed behaviour might eventually induce a change in values, we could give it a helping hand.  The education approach is an attempt to change the values of people.  Requiring people to know the rules of the game, and know the difficulty with using this knowledge in a practical situation, is surely worth considering.  It is probably not that far from touchline bans and financial penalties approaches as it might also work as a deterrent.
 
Is Gary Neville due another spell in management?  Is Jurgen Klopp due a spell in black?

By David Butler

Many studies have considered the impact of behind closed-door sporting events. Issues such as home advantage, odds pricing, attendance demand and performance have all been assessed. Last week, we published a paper in the Sports Economics Review that asks if the move to play elite football (soccer) matches without spectators during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted online viewership?

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Premier League matches being played behind closed doors. In the 2019-2020 season, the competition was suspended for several months and when it resumed in June 2020, matches were played without fans in attendance. This continued for the 2020-2021 season, save a limited number of matches where restricted capacities were allowed.

We use a new dataset from YouTube (Sky Sports Channel) to consider this and look at viewership ‘after the fact’ by measuring how many views highlights videos attract. As expected, the results indicate increased viewership for matches played without crowds. Fans couldn’t attend matches live and many had a lot more time on our hands. This boost to online viewership is robust to excluding those partially attended matches during the COVID period too.

As we consider ex-post demand, we can also look at motivators to watch when results are known. More on this curiosity to click next.

The full paper can be accessed here.