By Robbie Butler

The 3rd annual Sports Economics Workshop will be held on Friday 21st of July 2017 at University College Cork. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss and stimulate interdisciplinary research ideas from those working in the areas of economics, sport, coaching, public health, management, and related fields in Ireland and abroad.

Professor Bernd Frick (Paderborn University) will deliver the keynote address at 2.00pm in the North Wing Quadrangle Council Room. This lecture will be based on his new book, Conquering the Pitch – The Economics of Soccer.

Professor Frick will explore the development of soccer as the world’s most popular team sport and addresses competitive balance across a large number of leagues. The book provides a thorough understanding of the market for players, coaches and referees, as well as the demand for soccer on television, in stadiums and in the betting office.
Prior to the keynote, a morning session will be held from 10.00am to 11.30am in the Cavanagh Pharmacy Building where a series of technical papers will be presented with contributions from the sports of cycling, rugby and soccer. The full session is as follows:

• Uncertainty of Outcome and Grand Tour Cycling – Joel Maxcy (Drexel University)

• Regional Development in Interwar England through Football Statistics – Babatunde Buraimo (University of Liverpool), Rob Simmons (Lancaster) University) and Stefan Szymanski (University of Michigan).

• Bonus Incentives and Team-Effort Levels in European Cup Rugby: Evidence from the Field – Robbie Butler (University College Cork), Pat Massey (Compecon) and Liam Lenten (La Trobe University).

The morning session will be followed by a roundtable discussion from 11.45am to 1pm where the current and future direction of sports research in Ireland will be discussed. Discussants will include Peter Smyth (Director of Research – Sport Ireland), Elish Kelly (Senior Research Officer- Economic and Social Research Institute) and Sean Lucey (Business School Research Manager – University College Cork).

The workshop is free to attend and those interested should register at www.sportseconomics.org/workshop.
Organising Committee: David Butler, Robbie Butler and John Eakins.

This event is funded by Cork University Business School

As always, we are taking our summer break. We'll be back on Monday 7th of August.

Don't forget our workshop is on Friday 21st of July in University College Cork. Details on how to register can be found in the above post and on the 'Workshop' page.

By John Considine

In his famous 1968 article, Competition as a Discovery Procedure, Friedrich Hayek argued that the market provides a setting where competition would allow us to discover the "best" competitor.  He stressed that the "best" competitor tag had a temporal dimension.  The winner of a given competition is the "best" at that point in time and under those particular rules.  He drew analogies with sporting and academic competitions (and he noted the limitations of the analogies).  It is worth remembering Hayek's point when we see to make sporting comparisons across time and competitions.

David Epstein does a marvellous job of highlighting the problems, and potential solutions, in his TED talk titled "Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger? (here).  The author of The Sports Gene presents a series of illustrative examples.  One example illustrates the impact of technology on cycling performances.  A graphic from his TED talk is reproduced below.  In the 24 years after 1972 the record for distance travelled on a bike in one hour increased by almost 5 miles.  However, when the rules were changed to require that the same equipment be used, the improvement shrunk to less that 1,000 feet.

Another comparison of cycling performances from different eras is made in the documentary The King of Mont Ventoux (here).  The documentary was released to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the first Tour de France and it uses video footage to establish which of five cyclists climbed the iconic Mont Ventoux in the least time.  The documentary makers interview three of the five cyclists before, and during, a showing of the virtual race.  It is fascinating viewing.  Of course, there are other factors that the documentary makers identify and cannot control for in this virtual race.  For example, the more recent ascent of the bald mountain tend to be at the end of longer stages.  And, one of the cyclists had to contend with temperatures in the high thirties.

Sometimes the comparisons are more interesting to statisticians than sports fans.  In 2006 the Journal of Sports Economics published a paper that sought to make comparisons across all the competitions that go to make up the Tour de France.  They started by soliciting the opinions of cycling experts on the relative importance of winning the various jerseys on offer (Yellow, Green, Red Polka Dot) and podium finishes (stage win, second place, third place).  Using the relative importance derived as a result of this survey of opinions, they ranked the cyclists using data for the period 1953-2004.  Bernard Hinault headed the ranking.  In joint second place were Lance Armstrong and Eddy Merckx.

In 2006, when the paper was published, Armstrong held the record for the most Yellow jerseys (6).  Armstrong was not one of the five cyclists that competed in the virtual race in The King of Mont Ventoux.  However, he does feature prominently in the stage won by Marco Pantani. The speed which the two climb during the last 10 minutes of the 2000 Mont Ventoux stage is astonishing (here).  It was a battle between the 1999 Yellow Jersey (Armstrong) and the 1998 Yellow Jersey (Pantani).  Pantani won the battle (Stage win) but Armstrong won the war (Yellow Jersey).

What happened since that epic battle raises further issues about comparability.  Pantani died in 2004 at the age of 34 - having had his run in with the doping authorities.  He is still listed as the winner of the 1998 Tour de France.  Armstrong has been stripped of all his wins - having eventually admitted to doping.  No winners are listed for the Tour de France for the years 1999 to 2006.  Armstrong has been stripped of the 1999 to 2005 wins, and Floyd Landis of his 2006 win, for doping.  Nobody was subsequently promoted to Yellow for this years.  By contrast, Andy Schleck was deemed to be the winner in 2010 after Alberto Contador was found to have doped.

While the comparisons are interesting as thought experiments, it is probably best to remember that the winners are the best at that moment in time.  Even those who subsequently get promoted would probably agree that it is not the same as being deemed the "best" competitor at the time.

By David Butler

​The Cork City Marathon took place yesterday. The male winner was Chris Mocko (U.S) with a time of 02.26.42. This was close to a six-minute improvement on last year’s winning time. The female winner was Jill Hodgins with a time of 2.48.17

As Seamus Coffey was not around UCC this year, Robbie Butler filled the void and organised our relay team entry. ‘Random Walk’ finished 69th out of 661 entries - inclusive of youth and mixed gender teams. We recorded a time of 3:33:50. This was 24 places above our finish last year (93rd out of 689 relay teams).

The winning relay time was 2:21:32. Our relay team included contributors to this website; Robbie Butler (UCC), John Eakins (UCC), Sean O’Connor (CSO) and Myself (UCC). Brendan McElroy (UCC) was the fifth member of our team.

This is the best time and finishing position Random Walk has recorded over the years. The distribution of finishing times for the 2017 and 2016 relay are below.

By Robbie Butler

The British and Irish Lions begin their much anticipated tour of New Zealand this weekend. In total, the tourists will play ten matches during a five-week period, including three tests against World Champions New Zealand. One has to go back to 1971 to find the last, and only time the Lions won the series in New Zealand, with the All Blacks subsequently successful in 1977, 1983, 1993 and 2005. In fact, the last visit to New Zealand saw a whitewash victory for the hosts (3-0).

Success on the pitch is not the only benefit for New Zealand. A 2011 paper in Tourism Management by Johan Fourie and María Santana-Gallegob, entitled ​"The impact of mega-sport events on tourist arrivals" considers the impact of international visitors of six major sporting events. The six are  Summer and Winter Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup, Rugby World Cup, Cricket World Cup and British/Irish Lions Tour over the period 1995–2006. The results provide interesting reading. 

The authors find ​"...on average, mega-sporting events increase predicted tourism by roughly 8% in the same year. There is, however, large disparities between the types of event; the Summer Olympics, FIFA World Cup and, to a lesser extent the Cricket World Cup and Lions Tour, all seem to have a significant positive impact on tourism...while the Rugby World Cup and the Winter Olympic Games have a negative impact on tourism, ceteris paribus" (Fourie and Santana-Gallegob, 2011: 1364-1367). 

Crowding out and timing are both cited as possible explanations for the latter two events with the authors suggesting that "This may be due to tourism displacement, but is probably more the result of the smaller nature of these events and because the events analysed here were held in countries with an already strong tourism demand" (Fourie and Santana-Gallegob, 2011: 1369).

They continue by saying that "the size of tourism crowding-out may depend on the season in which the event is hosted. Events held during peak season, on average, tend to show a decline in predicted tourism, while events held during the off-season attract significantly higher numbers than what is predicted" (Fourie and Santana-Gallegob, 2011: 1369).