By David Butler

I’ll do a series of short posts offering insights to different topics for the 19/20 Premier League season. 

Where else can I start but with VAR – the villain of the piece. Now that the season has finished, how frequent were VAR controversies given the current implementation of the system and rules adopted?

On my count, there was 82 VAR controversies this season – about one in five matches were afflicted by a VAR debate. Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, there are no obvious team-specific patterns.

My magic 82 number is partly a judgment call but I'm confident it is in and around this figure. 

Defining a crisp criteria is tricky of course. Most of my controversies were defined by players offside by a pixel (or armpit!), the ball grazing a hand in the lead-up to a goal and incidents where penalties were/were not given. There were others too. Generally, the VAR controversies were associated with plenty of media debate and publicity. 

There are lots of uses of VAR not included in the 82. For example, take Ryan Bertrand’s straight red card for a reckless tackle on Ayoze Perez in Leicester’s 9-0 win against Southampton. VAR made this decision. I can’t see this red card being defined as a controversy under any definition. Other uses of VAR, such as when a player is clearly off-side for a goal, are also not included in this 82.

No doubt, this '1 in 5' stat is something the Premier League will want to reduce. This may involve changing the handball rule or encouraging referees to you use the touchline monitor more often. Improving the technology is important too. For me, many 'offsides by a pixel' fail to place the same precision on when the ball actually left the foot of the assisting player.  

Improving referee’s training must also be high on the list for administrators. As we are often reminded, VAR is for clear and obvious errors. If referee’s make less clear and obvious errors the frequency of VAR controversies should subside. 

By Robbie Butler

During the course of our summer break the sad news broke that two internationally respected and renowned sports economists passed away.

On the 4th of June, James (Jim) Quirk left this world. Jim was a retired Caltech Economics Professor (1971-1987) and a leading voice in sports economics. In 1971 he published “An Economic Model of a Professional Sports League” with Mohamed El Hodiri in the Journal of Political Economy.

Professor Quirk would later go on to publish highly influential papers including Cross Subsidization, Incentives, and Outcomes in Professional Team Sports Leagues in the Journal of Economic Literature (1995) and Owner Objectives and Competitive Balance in the Journal of Sports Economics, both with Professor Rod Fort (University of Michigan), as well as “Stadiums, Arenas, and Major League Sports: The Twin Cities’ Experience”, in Sports, Jobs and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Sports Stadiums (Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist, editors). A fitting obituary to Jim Quirk can be found here.

Just one month later, on the 5th of July, Vanderbilt University Professor Emeritus John Vrooman also left us. John was another international voice in sports economics and had been writing in the area for more than a quarter of a century. In 1995 Prof. Vrooman published A General Theory of Professional Sports Leagues in the Southern Economics Journal. This paper is cited almost 450 times to date.

John would follow this up with other notable contributions to the literature including Theory of the Beautiful Game: The Unification of European Football in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy (2007) and Theory of the Perfect Game: Competitive Balance in Monopoly Sports Leagues (2009) in Review of Industrial Organization. Until last month he kept
​the "Sports Econ Blog" active. His last post is dated June 11th 2020. An obituary to John Vrooman can be found here.

May they both rest in peace.

By John Considine.

Over the last few days, I was reminded of the importance of reference points in arguments about the economics of sport. A few days ago, a story broke about a player, from an organisation that prohibits pay-for-play, offering a skills coaching session for a fee. It is provoking a fair deal of debate.

This was one of the stories discussed in yesterday’s Off-the-Ball Paper Review. Another discussion involved the loss of boxing talent (partly) due to financial constraints. The public funding of boxing was compared to the public funding of swimming. No prizes for guessing how boxing looked by comparison. And yet another newspaper story discussed involved Nike and the Clean Clothes Campaign.

Consider the presentation of the arguments by Nike and the Clean Clothes Campaign. The Clean Clothes Campaign, and those who support it, compare the payment received by the workers to the salaries of Premier League footballers and the price paid by customers for replica shirts. Nike compare the payments to their workers to those of similar workers. The comparisons are chosen to illustrate the arguments.

Dean Rock is a gaelic footballer. Like all gaelic footballers he is not paid to play gaelic football. However, he is paid by the Irish government to be available for selection to play for his county. Dean plays for Dublin – a county that has won the last five All-Ireland senior football titles. Dean is their player who takes more than his share of Dublin’s free kicks in the scoring zone.

Why the debate? It is useful to consider the reference points, or comparisons, used in the debate. Consider who Dean is compared to. The unpaid coaches from his childhood. The paid kicking coaches of other sports. The other county players who provide unpaid coaching. The other county players who take payment for coaching sessions. The paid strength & conditioning coaches. The unpaid strength & conditioning coaches. The unpaid club officials. The paid officials operating at county or Croke Park level. The paid games development officers.

A favourite comparison is with the money paid to the managers/coaches of GAA club teams. This ignores a more amusing comparison and what it says about the GAA. Many GAA clubs pay the “expenses” of a manager/coach from outside their club but they will not pay the “expenses” of somebody from inside the club. A few years ago, a club I know of, was coached by a member who had played with the club since childhood. He travelled over 200km per session to coach the team. No expenses. The club decided it needed an outside manager/coach in an effort to get promoted. That person’s services would require a financial outlay. No problem. The new coach would make the short journey was from a neighbouring parish. He was paid “expenses”. He did take them out of the division. Unfortunately, he took them down and not up. Relegation and not promotion. The old coach returned the following year. Promotion was secured. Expenses were not.

Whatever the club thought they were buying, it was not the quantity or quality of coaching. I see a similar situation annually in terms of academic coaching/teaching. Every year I hear about students who skip some of their lectures and tutorials that are provided by qualified, experienced and committed staff. Yet, they pay for private tuition in the same subject. The funny part is that they complain about the money being made by the private sector operator.

On the surface, it seems that the payment is for Dean Rock to impart his knowledge of free-taking. However, there is probably more to it. A parent might purchase the service for their child for the same reason that other parents buy the rights for their children to walk out at Anfield holding the hand of Jordan Henderson or one of his teammates. A wealthy aunt or uncle might decide it is an ideal present to show how much they care for, and think of, their nephew/niece. Or maybe a club might purchase Dean’s time to convey to their players that they are prepared to invest in the team’s development.

What I like about the Dean Rock service is that it says it will involve the "subsequent evaluation of this practice". Obviously, it will be far from a randomised control trial. Will it be based on a comparison of in-competition success rate? Will it involve a comparison of player A's conversion rates before and after the intervention? Or will it involve a comparison of free-takers coached by Rock versus those not coached by Rock? How will it control for other circumstances? I'd imagine that a few opponents might engage in verbals questioning the person's decision to get such coaching and reminding them of it after every unsuccessful kick.

To use the title of Alvin Roth's book, the Dean Rock service raises questions about payments in the GAA. Who gets what? And Why?