By Ed Valentine and Robbie Butler
In our latest analysis of the World Cup we take a closer look at last night’s game between hosts Brazil and their South American neighbours Colombia. The game was far from a classic. In fact, some argued it was depressing to watch a World Cup Quarter Final with so many cynical fouls. Despite this, only two yellow cards were brandished by the match referee, the first of which arrived just after the hour mark, following the game’s 41st foul!
In total the game contained 54 fouls, the most of the tournament so far. In fact, the next highest is the 51-foul-game between Brazil (again) and Chile in their Second Round. Brazil committed 31 of the 54 fouls (57.4%). This is the highest number of fouls committed by a single team in any World Cup Finals match ever! The second half alone contained a massive 28 fouls. That’s about one every 90 seconds, denying either side the chance to build up any serious momentum. To give you a better idea, the OPTA figure below illustrates where the 28 second half fouls were committed by both teams. So much for the legend of Brazil and Samba Soccer.
By Gary Burns The big sports story currently in the NBA is that LeBron James has decided to ‘opt-out’of his contract with the Miami Heat and become an un-restricted free agent. LeBron has been with the Miami Heat over the past four years, winning two championships with them. Having an‘opt-out’ feature in a sports contract would be unfamiliar to those more familiar with soccer, so what does this actually mean? As with other American sports, in the NBA there are no transfer fees for players. Once contracts are signed players generally remain with the franchise unless traded for college draft picks, other players or to free up salary cap room (teams have a limit on what they can spend on contracts to promote competitive balance). However a player may decide to include a ‘player option’ for a particular year in their contract which allows them to become a free agent and sign for another franchise or indeed re-sign for their current team. This is exactly what James has decided to do by ‘opting-out’ of his contract with the Heat and is a free-agent on the 1st July. Although somewhat expected, the news has still sent ripples through NBA hierarchies as James is regarded as the one of the best currently in the NBA. Arguably, one of the best of all-time. Other franchises will have to ‘make-room’ for James if they want his signature. In real terms this means that franchises will have to clear-out expensive contracts to accommodate the approximately $22 million James was due if he remained with the Heat. Some of the early contenders include the LA Lakers, LA Clippers, Houston Rockets and perhaps a return to his hometown and former team Cleveland Cavaliers. He could also, and very likely, return to the Miami Heat. It appears that the Dallas Mavericks, Phoenix Suns and LA Lakers all have sufficient salary cap room to sign James. There is shrewd economic thinking behind LeBrons decision to opt-out. His decision could be a signal to Miami Heat to off-load some ageing talent that takes up large salary space and replace them with talent to help LeBron win a third championship. Also money may be a factor. Players in the free market can acquire greater salaries than those in contracts. Due to the collective bargaining agreement the NBA has with franchises, the upper end players tend to lose out. James is expected to seek the maximum contract on offer as he took a lower contract to allow the “Big 3” to happen in Miami four years ago. Or perhaps he may be opting out of his contract to allow Miami more salary-cap space to sign top talent, and then he can re-sign at a lower rate than his current contract states. There is also other very notable free agents already announced and expected to become free agents. Carmelo Anthony, Nick Young, Dirk Nowitzki , Kyle Lowry and both of the other “Big 3” teammates of James in Miami, Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade who have early termination options in their contracts and have opted out. This should make for an interesting summer as the equivalent of the football transfer window opens as the most talented players are up for grabs. Unlike Association Football, the real difference here is that technically all teams can compete for the talent. Strategic positioning of a team is important in the NBA as they must ensure that the contracts they offer do not prohibit them from competing for free agency talent when available. Whatever happens, fans of every franchise will argue their case for Lebron to choose their city as his impact in Miami has proven that he has the talent to change the landscape in the NBA. By Ed Valentine & Robbie Butler By John Considine Five years ago the Irish government, where the Green Party was the minor coalition partner, introduced a cycle-to-work scheme. The scheme encouraged individuals to cycle to work by allowing the purchase costs of cycling equipment, up to €1,000, to be offset against income tax. The Minister for Finance stated that, at the time the scheme was introduced, it was estimated that 7,000 employees would avail of the scheme over the first five years at a costs of €0.4m to the Exchequer. Unfortunately, in an effort to reduce administration costs, the statistics on the uptake of the scheme were not collected. Almost three years after the scheme was introduced the Irish Bicycle Business Association produced their Report on the Cycle to Work Scheme Tax Incentive. The report makes some big claims about the success of the scheme and its contribution to the Irish economy. It is worth looking more closely at some of these claims. One of the claims in Section 4.3 of the Report is that the scheme has saved "the Economy €15.3million a year". This figure is derived by using a daily saving of €170 and multiplying this by "90,000 (new cyclists)". The Minister for Finance claimed 7,000 employees would take up the scheme whereas the IBBA report suggests there will be 90,000 new cyclists. That's some difference. The IBBA Report figures have the advantage of being estimated after the scheme was introduced. It is unfortunate that the government decided against collecting data on the uptake of the scheme. It would allow us to validate the IBBA data. If the 90,000 figure is correct then the scheme could have cost the Exchequer a substantial amount in income tax forgone. It also raises questions about the forecasting ability of those advising the Minister for Finance.
It would be important to validate this €15.3m figure as it seems to comprise the majority of the total of €19m in benefits from the scheme. The report also claims that recent research (and a newspaper report from May 2011) shows the "decline in deaths for cyclists over the past decade has been greater than for any other group in the research". It is difficult to find support for this claim when one looks at the table and figure below. There has been a welcome improvement in the total number of road fatalities in Ireland. Road fatalities in 2012 are about 40% of what they were in 2000. However, the numbers do not support a claim that the decline in deaths for cyclists has been greater than for any other group. By Ed Valentine & Robbie Butler
Sadly for the Greeks they left the World Cup earlier this week. While many found their approach to football boring, even mechanical, their play is based on percentage football and leaves little on the table for the opposition to mop up. The Greece-Costa Rica match was never going to be fast, flowing and attractive football but it was a strong tactical display for two hours or so. The Central Americans had much more of the ball in the opening 35 minutes (61%) but the Greeks were happy for them to have so much as they sat deep and absorbed pressure. As the game went on the Greeks wore their opponents down and forced them into extra time with a last minute equaliser. Amazingly, age is no impediment to some. The illustrations below (courtesy of OPTA) show the average position of each player and their influence during the 30 minutes of extra time. The most influential player on the pitch...one Giorgos Karagounis, at a mere 37 years of age! The oldest player on the pitch in fact. What a pro. By Pádraig MacConsaidín With the FIFA World Cup in Brazil well underway, over recent weeks television advertisements have been commandeered by various players endorsing a product or service. Using soccer luminaries, or more accurately, their image, to promote products is big business, especially during major tournaments; such as the FIFA World Cup and UEFA European Championships. For those of us of a certain vintage, we can still remember Kevin Moran extolling the virtues of using the Irish Permanent’s ‘bureau de change’ service, to convert Irish Punts into Italian Lira before leaving home to follow the boys in green around Italy in 1990.The Adidas and Nike adverts in the run up to the big tournaments always stimulate interest as to who will devise the more exciting, captivating and adventurous advertisement; featuring the galaxy of stars signed to each company’s respective marketing stable. This practice has become more pervasive over the last twenty years, which begs the question; what do you give the global soccer superstar who has vast amounts of money in return for using his image? The answer, unsurprisingly enough, is in fact, more money. To understand the phenomenon a little better, perhaps we should reflect briefly on the history of image rights in football. From the early to mid-1990s, sponsorship deals in English football were moving into multi-million pound territory. The arrival or BSkyB as a corporate entity, which secured the rights to broadcast live Premiership football, beating off competition from the BBC and ITV, provided significant revenue streams for clubs in the top flight of English football. This allowed players to command higher salaries, while off the field, they were also beginning to realise their star potential through endorsements, as the Premiership footballer began to achieve global exposure through the broadcasting of the league across continents. The days where football’s greats like Best, Charlton and Brady bought their own boots were gone. Players were now rewarded for endorsing a specific brand, where brand loyalty and exclusivity brought; financial remuneration, further commercial exposure and an endless supply of boots; customised with the player’s name, those of his children, or both. This newly acquired stardom and earning potential did not go unnoticed amongst the non-English based players either. In the 1992/1993 season, in the opening round of matches, only eleven players named in all clubs starting line-ups were classified as ‘foreign’ (non-UK or IRE). This increased to 36 per cent of all players for the 2000/2001 season and increased again to 45 per cent for the 2004/2005 season. Historically, Arsenal was the first club to name an entire sixteen man squad of ‘foreign’ players for a game in February 2005. The Premier League was an attractive proposition for any overseas footballer, especially those who possessed a star quality, with the lure of the financial rewards and increasingly prevalent commercial opportunities the league presented. As a new wave of non-British player arrived to the Premier League, so too did the business savvy players’ agent and shrewd financial advisor. In the early days of the Premier League, paying players was a relatively straight forward exercise. The player was paid a salary, on which he could expect to pay approximately 50 per cent income tax. As the advisors and agents became more involved in the negotiations, the remuneration package was essentially divided into two components; first the salary and second, a fee to allow the club to use the player’s image. The salary was, as before, directly taxable by Her Majesty’s Revenue Commissioners, however, the payment of the fee for the ‘image rights’ was more complex. This could be paid into an off shore company and thus avoid the high rate of income tax. Instead, this amount would be assessable under a corporate tax structure, which was often half the rate of income tax for high earners. The case which stands out in this regard is that of Dennis Bergkamp. The Arsenal player was paid in total, £3.5 million a year by the club, £2 million in salary and £1.5 million by way of ‘image rights’. The ratio of pay to image rights raised eyebrows in the headquarters of the Inland Revenue who challenged the arrangement on grounds of tax avoidance, but in the end, following an investigation by a special commission, Bergkamp won out. The commission deemed the structuring of the ‘image rights’ payment, a legitimate commercial contract. A precedent was set. However, the Bergkamp deal was small change in the overall scheme of things for what was to come in terms of players cashing in on their ‘image rights’, both in terms of contracts and off the field endorsements. This will be discussed in a further post on this blog. By David Butler On the 19th of December 1990, some months after West Germany had lifted the World Cup in Italy, a reunited German national team played its first international tie, defeating Switzerland 4-0 in a friendly in Stuttgart. From that day on, all German national team managers could select players for international squads from a larger population of the merged German Democratic Republic (eastern region) and German Federal Republic (western region). It is nearly 25 years since this Swiss tie but there still appears to be a significant divide between the historical regions when it comes to the German national team. Despite reunification there is a distinct divergence in the birth place of players in German World Cup squads between the west and the east that survives to this day. Since the 1994 World Cup there has been 136 places available in German World Cup squads. 100 (74%) of these have been filled by western born (or previously western born) players, while only 22 (16%) have been occupied by eastern born (or previously eastern born) players. As would be expected, many of these footballers have gone to more than one World Cup. Even if we control for this, the statistics largely stay the same. In total 92 German players have travelled to World Cups since 1994, 69 of which were from the west. 7 internationally born Germans have also reached the squad from 2002 onward (Cacau-Brazil, Klose, Trochowski, Podolski-Poland, Marin-former Yugoslavia, Neuville-Switzerland, Asamoah-Ghana). As for the 2014 squad, Toni Kroos is the only player from the old east Germany to make it to Brazil and both Podolski and Klose were born in Poland. The other 20 Germans were born in the west. There are many reasons why this geographical pattern occurs. The observed differences are probably not unicausal and far too complex to discuss at length here. Solely for the purposes of conjecture I would think that political reasons (Declan Jordan discussed political regimes and the success of football clubs here and here), socio-economic reasons (investment stories and the the prevelance of Bundesliga clubs that are located in the west) and cultural reasons, all have a part to play in understanding the divergence. Above all else, there would be a clear population effect and the distribution could easily be representative of the population of the regions.
Perhaps this effect will fade as time passes. The youngest player of all 92 observations, Julian Draxler, was born in Gladbeck in 1993. This was only some 3 years after Klinsmann, Völler et al (below) lined out for the famous match in Stuttgart. The globalisation of the sport may also serve to create a greater dispersion in birth places, as the data suggests more foreign born players are registering for Germany as time has passed (and many home born players are now registering for other countries, as the current U.S.A squad would suggest). While recent research challenges the proposition that Germany suffers from an economic divide between the west and east when it comes to the German national football team, the legacy survives. By Ed Valentine & Robbie Butler We have to admit we were caught by surprise watching the Germany Algeria game last night. The African team played really well and we were shocked at how close they came to defeating a European powerhouse. Most people we spoke to today had the same thoughts. Algeria really impressed and could have knocked out one of the favourites for the competition last night. However, despite what we saw, the Germans dominated the statistics. In fact, some records were broken last night by the Germans. Die Adler (The Eagles) had 28 shots on goal – a record at World Cup 2014! Toni Kroos had 473 touches in the game, the highest ever recorded at a single World Cup match! Philipp Lahm had 438 touches, the only other player to make it past the 400 mark in a single match this World Cup. However probably the most noticable thing about last night was the movement of German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer. The Bayern Munich stopper played like a sweeper at times, rushing off his line on many occasions to prevent or stop Algerian attacks. To the right is Neuer’s heat map duirng the game last night (courtsey of OPTA). The goalkeepers movement looks similar to that of any central defender or sweeper! The Germans looked exposed at the back at times and one would wonder if they’d get away with that against more clinical opposition. By Gary Burns After the Froch-Groves rematch some time back, I was asked by many people why boxing rematches are so common. The concept of a rematch clause or negotiated rematch is one that many sports do not encounter because of centrally governed bodies. Rematches occur naturally when these bodies exist and contracts do not have to be recurrently drawn up. Very rarely do rematches, or indeed any encounters, occur naturally in boxing. There is probably a blend of sporting and economic reasons that ensure rematches occur in boxing. The sporting ones include a boxers desire to right a wrong or to correct for a poor performance while economic ones may include the mutual monetary benefits of a rematch and the need to diminish the effect of a previous defeat to invest in ones reputation for future big fights. A champion can reduce the risk of losing a title for a prolonged period by including a rematch clause if they lose and is really a means by which a champion can insure against the loss of future earnings. In the most recent high profile rematch, Carl Froch once again defeated Georges Groves albeit a lot more convincingly this time. In weeks previous, Manny Pacquiao overcame Timothy Bradley, which many believed to be the correction of a controversial and some would say poorly judged first match. If we assume that both fighters are of similar elite level (rematch clauses would generally not be applied to lower level opposition), generally if the champion loses the fight, they will have the right to invoke a rematch upon loss. If the rematch is not granted a fighter may be taken to court or can potentially be stripped of any titles by the governing body in question. There seems to be distinct reasons for the inclusion of the clause depending on the fighter. When defeated in a huge shock knockout in 2001 to Hashim Rahman, Lennox Lewis was forced to go to court to invoke the clause. He subsequently regained the heavyweight championship. This case is an example of a straightforward champion wanting to regain his title in light of an unexpected result. Another example is Scottish lightweight Ricky Burns who lost his world title to Terence Crawford. Although insisting he does want a rematch, many analysts believe any repeat of the first fight would detrimentally affect his value as a prize-fighter and thus the rematch clause should not be invoked in this case. An unusual case of a winner wanting a rematch clause invoked was that of Timothy Bradley who won his first bout with Pacquiao. He was so distraught by criticism of his controversial victory levelled at him he wished to prove his critics wrong by beating Pacquiao again. The economic motives of fighting the much followed Pacquiao surely played a significant role too. Unfortunately for him he lost the rematch. Arguably the greatest of his generation, Floyd Mayweather Jr insists on rematch clauses. A recent opponent Robert Guerrero, when asked about the rematch clause that Floyd Mayweather insisted upon, said it showed him “where his head is”. In a sport like boxing, the admittance of even the potential of defeat by a champion can give a challenger a psychological edge. Rematches can also be negotiated. As can be seen historically, they have gone some way in cementing the legacy of fighters. Perhaps relying on each other is not only a lucrative tactic but also a means to strengthen ones place in the sport. Rematches generate interest through the formation of a rivalry which can be difficult to create in a sport where once off opponents are more common. Part of the success of Froch-Groves II can certainly be attributed to this. Manny Pacquiao- Juan Manuel Marquez (4 fights), Israel Vasquez – Rafael Marquez (4 fights), Arturo Gatti –Micky Ward (3 fights) Erik Morales – Antonio Barrera (3 fights), Muhammad Ali –Joe Frazier (3 fights), Roberto Duran- Sugar Ray Leonard (3 fights) are just some examples of great multiple fight rivalries. What is the net effect of a rematch clause in economic terms? Research has been conducted on this question. In Rematches in Boxing and Other Sporting Events, J. Atsu Amegashie and Edward Kutsoati look at the incentive effects of rematches, particularly in professional boxing and found that if there was a high chance (mandatory) of a rematch or very low chances of rematches it generated greater aggregate effort. In reality however as most elite boxers need other elite boxer’s, chances are rematches are quite high without any clauses. |
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