By Robbie Butler

During the weekend I was watching television when the logo to the right appeared on the screen. I asked someone present (who has little interest in football) "what do you think of when you see that?" The immediate reply was "Man Utd". It was the answer I expected. 

I thought to myself, what a remarkable piece of advertisement this was by Sharp Corporation given that the relationship with the Manchester United jersey ended more than 20 years ago! And what a deal United got too given that people still think about their brand when they see the word "Sharp". It demonstrates the reach that sport - and by extension - the football jersey has on the lives of people with little or no interest in the sport.

As a follow up, I asked the person "what do you think of when we see the logos below?" "Liverpool and Arsenal" was the reply.

Carlsberg have not sponsored the Liverpool jersey since 2010 and JVC vacated the Arsenal front way back in 1999. Yet we still associate these companies with the respective clubs.

In the case of Liverpool, the Danish beer company had been preceded by Candy, Crown Paints and the Hitachi. In Arsenal's case, the longevity of JVC is to be admired, spanning from 1981 to 1999. it was also the club's first sponsor and maybe one of the reasons why the association which ended in the 20th century, continues today.

Such long term relationships are not the norm. Bolton Wanderers and Reebok continue to hold the recorded for the longest Premier League status quo (I think) but Arsenal's current arrangement with Fly Emirates is closing in on that. The North London side hold the present record having started the relationship back in 2006. Chelsea had been the sponsor's go-to club from 2001-2005 but the airline then switch blue for red.

Whether they continue as long as JVC, or get the legacy effects, remains to be seen. One thing is for sure. Sharp will also be Manchester United. Carlsberg Liverpool. And JVC Arsenal.

There are many others than I am sure you can associate with the past. Commodore, Holston, Brother, NEC.... 

By Robbie Butler

I had an invited article on RTÉ Brainstorm yesterday. The focus of the piece is the English Premier League transfer window. The piece can be found here and an abridged version of the text is below.


For almost 12 weeks – nearly a week before a ball was kicked at Euro 2020 – the English Premier League transfer window has been open.  The window allows clubs to buy, sell and loan players in order to prepare for the long season ahead. As is normal during a summer break with a major international competition, a flurry of deals in the last two weeks of the window is almost standard practice.

This summer’s Premier League window has been dominated by certain names. Kane. Grealish. Varane. Lukaku. Sancho. Further afield, Paris St Germain made international headlines by capturing a number of marquee players, including Sergio Ramos, Gianluigi Donnarumma and Lionel Messi from Barcelona.

As one of the greatest players of all time, Messi’s move took many by surprise and captures aspects of the modern game so well. Technically unattached as his Barcelona contract had expired, the Argentina captain was free to negotiate a contract with any club.

Football players can thank Jean Marc Bosman for this. The Belgian player was responsible for the 1995 European Court of Justice ruling in the case of Union Royale Belge des Sociétés de Football Association ASBL vs Jean-Marc Bosman. This paved the way for free movement once contracts expired.

Messi’s arrival in Paris means Barcelona received no transfer fee. This is not because Messi did not have a value but rather because Barcelona no longer held his registration. Had Messi been under contract, he would likely have cost PSG something similar to the fee they paid to capture Neymar from Barcelona in 2017.

Harry Kane’s situation is almost the opposite. Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy appears to be holding firm despite Man City’s bids for the Spurs captain, who has three years left on his contract. Reports suggest Man City have bid in excess of £100 million for Kane but Levy is refusing to allow the club’s top goal scorer to leave.

Most view this as the price to buy the player, or as some proxy of the players value to the team or business. The transfer fee is rather the compensation paid to the selling club in order to break a player’s contract. A player’s value is therefore intrinsically linked to the number of years left of their contract. If Harry Kane had just one year left on his contract, Man City would probably only bid half the amount for the exact same player. They might bid even less, or wait a year and take the player for free.

In the modern game, signing a new contract is no longer always a signal that a player is committing to a club. Rather, it could be an attempt to protect the value of the asset to the club or involve the insertion of a release clause so a player can move on in the near future.

With time running out in this year’s window, we can expect plenty of activity in the days ahead. And while the focus of the window is always on the superstar players and biggest deals, 180 players were made unemployed this summer by Premier League clubs. Crystal Palace alone released 22 players, 12 of which were considered “senior” players. Most will reach agreements with other clubs in the Premier League or Championship, but some will probably continue looking for work into September and beyond.

By Saturday morning, as many other industries and labour markets continue to grapple with the pandemic, football’s transfer activity will have continued apace. It is estimated that the 20 Premier League clubs will have spent  about £1 billion this summer. This includes the breaking of the British transfer record by an English club and the most expensive English player ever.

This, despite a huge drop in revenue during the 2020/21 season due to a collapse in matchday activity, demonstrates the wealth of these clubs and their owners. And don’t forget, it is only 4 months until the January transfer window opens. Hundreds of millions of pounds will again be no doubt spent in order to make sure next May is a cause for celebration; be that survival, European football, the Champions League or maybe even the Premier League title.

By Ed Valentine

Much of the talk surrounding sport over the last 20 months has been centred on the loss and reintroduction of crowds at professional football matches. From dubbed audio borrowed from the FIFA video games being piped into our living rooms to YouTube Fan TV channels conducting socially distant “watch alongs”, the atmosphere at games just couldn’t be replicated. The talk among pundits in the early days of covid football was whether the lack of crowds had an impact on player performance.
 
The opening rounds of last season saw an increase in goals scored relative to the average of previous seasons, some of which could be attributed to the rise in penalties dished out. It had many TV analysts and journalists arriving at the conclusion that no crowds at games resulted in less pressure on players which gave them the renewed psychological freedom to focus on the game.
 
This may be true, however there are some interesting stats to compare in the opening two rounds of this season to the same opening rounds of last year’s campaign. The table and figure below present data on the number of shots by the home and away teams for the first two games of the 2020/21 and 2021/22 seasons.

​For the first two match days of the current season, we can see the overall number of attempts at goal has increased by about 13%. What is interesting about the breakdown of the data is that the number of attempts at goal by the home team, with the reintroduction of fans, is higher than last season. While we have seen less goals across the opening two weekends, perhaps attributed in some ways to fewer penalties, the number of attempts registered at goal is up.
 
This is very early days however and as players become reacquainted with fans in stadiums it will be interesting to make further comparisons across the season.

By John Considine

There is a small economic argument to support the decision of the GAA to reschedule the All-Ireland football semi-final (due to covid-19 complications).

Tyrone supporters would be visitors to the Republic of Ireland and would, therefore, contribute to the Irish economy.  By contrast, the Kerry supporters who travel to Dublin are not adding to the Irish economy.  They are spending money in Dublin that they could otherwise spend in Kerry.  Dublin's gains are Kerry's losses.  Unlike Tyrone, both counties are part of the Republic of Ireland.

It is not an argument the GAA would make.  The troubled history of the island of Ireland makes it an uncomfortable argument for many GAA people.  I made a similar point to a prominent GAA person a number of years ago.  He replied, "John, we don't see it that way."

By Robbie Butler

With the delayed 2020 Summer Olympic Games now over, the medal table looked pretty much as expected. The USA were 1st (39 Gold/113 Total), China 2nd (38 Gold/88 Total), Japan 3rd (27 Gold/58 Total) and Great Britain (GB) 4th (22 Gold/65 Total).

When one thinks about the factors that help countries accumulate medals at the Games, it would appear on the surface that GDP is very important. The USA, China and Japan had the largest GDPs in 2020 and won medals in that order. GB in 4th in the medal table had the 5th biggest GDP in 2020. Had Germany finished 4th instead of 9th, there would have been a perfect match between the medal table and GDP in 2020.

Of course, it is much more complex than that. A recently published paper by Vadim Kufenko and Vincent Geloso in the Journal of Institutional Economics explores this. 

Using data from the Economic Freedom index and the medal table at the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, the authors test the relationship between success and inequality. They find "inequality only matters in determining medal numbers for unfree countries". Free society success at the Games is not effected by the level of inequality within countries. Instead they authors argue that  "institutions [within free societies] generate incentives to invest in the talents of individuals at the bottom of the income distribution". 

From an Irish perspective, we can relate to this. We won two gold medals (rowing and boxing), one of which was won by an competitor from a low income area in Dublin. The paper argues that the incentives in place in a country like Ireland mitigate the negative effect that inequality plays in the selection of athletes and their success.

By David Butler

I like to consider the Moneyball idea on a recurring basis in football. I’ve done different versions of it over the years on this blog. Sheffield United and Tottenham were past examples, who, at the time, were punching well above their weight. This wasn’t sustained (as was the case in the original Moneyball context).
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It’s Atalanta’s turn now. The Serie A side take the Moneyball honour based on last year’s Serie A performances. With a budget of just 3.74m they finished third with 78 points and qualified for the Champions League. Sassuolo headed in that direction too, reaching 62 points with a budget of just 3.56m.  

The chart below plots the relationship between points accrued in Serie A 20/21 and annual budgets. As is nearly always the case, 'doing a Moneyball' doesn't lead to silverware, but it is a signal of strong performance in terms of club organization, recruitment etc. Atalanta were a little unlucky losing in the final of the Coppia Italia. 

The question is did Atalanta get lucky with the recruitment of talented players? If yes, then major clubs will target their squad (as Tottenham recently did with Cristian Romero), if not, I'm guessing major clubs will target their staff. 

By John Considine

One of the most enjoyable workshops that I have attended was on the subject of coaching games.  As an introduction to the topic of defending, the speaker played a short video (here).  It was designed to show that patience plays a large part in the art of defending.  Sometimes inaction can be better than action.  At around the same time, the sport psychologist Michael Bar-Eli was making a similar point in the Journal of Economic Psychology.  Bar-Eli's paper examines data on penalty kicks and he suggests that goalkeepers would save more penalties by diving less.

Bar-Eli documents the background to this research in his 2018 book called Boost! How the psychology of sports can enhance your performance in management and work.  After getting a Professorship in Ben-Gurion University, the Dean introduced Bar-Eli to Ilana Ritov.  Ritov's research examined "inaction bias" in vaccinations.  Too few people were getting vaccinated.  After reading her research, Bar-Eli considered if the opposite bias might explain the behaviour of goalkeepers in penalty kicks.  In the case of goalkeepers, he suspected that the bias was towards action rather than inaction.  Ilena Ritov joined Bar-Eli and the result was the Journal of Economic Psychology paper showing an action bias.  Goalkeepers could learn from the lion in the video above.

Bar-Eli and his coauthors explained their findings by reference to a paper by Daniel Kahneman and Dale Miller dealing with norm theory.  An economist might have noted the similarities with elements of Chapter 12 from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.  This is the chapter where John Maynard Keynes discusses animal spirits - "a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction".  A quote from the chapter can be used to capture the explanation offered by Bar-Eli and his colleagues - "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally".  The norm is for keepers to dive.  The reputation of a goalkeeper who does not dive might suffer.

I was not surprised to read that the Journal of Economic Psychology paper was "chosen by the New York Times Magazine as one of the significant highlights and most innovative research breakthroughs of 2008".  I would recommend it because of the way the differences between the results and previous literature are clearly explained.  Economists like Steven Levitt and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta had separately shown that penalty kickers and goalkeepers followed an optimal minimax strategy.  Bar-Eli's paper is a model of clarity in explaining the apparent contradictions.

The year 2008 was at the start of the Great Recession. I smiled when I read a paragraph in the paper that explained the importance of understanding these biases for economics.  It says that such an understanding is importance to investors and governments.  Seventy years earlier, in his attempt to explain the Great Depression, Keynes did something similar in Chapter 12 from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.  At the start of the chapter he identified the need for data when he said "Our conclusions must depend upon the actual observation of markets and business psychology".  He did not include observations of sports events.  It was a period before big data and data analytics.  However, his illustrative examples did consider the psychology of parlor games, such as card games and musical chairs.  These were the games used by the mathematician John von Neumann to illustrate the minimax theorem he proved in 1928 - the same minimax theorem that economists like Levitt and Palacios-Huerta use on penalty kick in the 21st century.

It is not hard to imagine Keynes using the action bias in goalkeepers to explain the investor behaviour that contributed to the Great Depression.  To take another quote from Chapter 12, he said these psychological "considerations should not lie beyond the purview of the economist".

By David Butler

As goals often don’t tell the full story of a football match, we’ve become acquainted with the xG stat. Expected goals are calculated based on the chance that a shot will be scored given the characteristics of that attempt (location of shot, body part used etc.). 

There are various providers that calculate this statistic and lots of the underlying methods are private. There might be a concern however that different methods lead to different conclusions – a problem we don’t get when evaluating goals.

The histogram below displays the distributions of Xg (match) for recent seasons in the Premier League for two firms providing this statistic.  From the data we learn that providers are using different models/techniques to derive Xg as both distributions do not plot directly onto one another. That said, the distributions are similar, so these minor variations may not be a cause for great concern.