By Robbie Butler

Our latest paper is now available free online. 

We contribute to the literature on demand for football by investigating the effect of variations in competition design on spectator turnout. We examine attendance in the League of Ireland Premier Division for two periods with alternative league formats, estimating club-fixed effects regressions.

Our results show that the change did not increase average attendance. Many determinants of attendance are robust to the reorganisation and balance measures are consistent under both formats. Like past evidence from the League, habit, team form, scheduling and travel are important determinants.

Our results speak to league administrators and club owners attempting to optimise revenues.

You can download the full PDF from the Economic and Social Review website here.

By Ed Valentine

One thing that was clear from the recent transfer window was the slowdown that’s taking place in continental European football. While Real Madrid offered hundreds of millions to PSG in an attempt to secure the signing of Killian Mbappe, other European giants like Juventus and Barcelona had to offload Ronaldo and Messi in order to balance their books. While the Dortmunds and the Villareals of this world kept their hands in their pockets, the Premier League Twenty broke £1 billion again. The Sky Sports News money totaliser was changing like a fruit machine as £100m, £85m, £35m deals were being struck as quickly as the vidiprinter updates with news from around the grounds on a Saturday afternoon.
 
The charts below demonstrate just how much more the English top flight spent this window. Although spending is down on the previous two windows it is way off in the stratosphere compared to the next highest spending league, Serie A at £436 million. In Ligue 1 the co pound effects of Covid19 and the TV deal collapse are clear with spending down 45% on 2019.
 
The volume of transfers is also down on previous years with only the Bundesliga reporting a higher volume of player transfers, some of which were fuelled by cash from Leon Bailey and Jadon Sancho departing.
 
With big names back in the Premier League and a potential record breaking >£100 million Harry Kane deal to come the executives, regardless of a future lockdonws, will continue to rub their hands.
​

By John Considine

This blog post is prompted by a 2021 paper in Experimental Economics that discusses the relationship between emotions and economic decisions made in a sports bar while patrons watched NFL games.  Reading the paper increased my happiness on two counts.  First, I enjoyed reading it.  Second, I can justifiably claim that it is part of my job to keep up to date with the literature (something that even the most strident bureaucrat would not dispute in public).  Being an academic has a lot going for it.
 
My mother had misgivings about a job that involved virtually no physical effort (although the Health & Safety people think that I lift heavy boxes - "straight back and bend the knees").  I can only imagine what she would think about my reading a paper about questions asked in a sports bar.  My father would cast a skeptical eye on the findings despite the authors' best efforts to explain that the consumption of alcohol does not invalidate their findings.

In the Experimental Economics paper, Judd Kessler and colleagues examine four types of decisions: charitable giving; willingness-to-pay for consumer goods; risky gambles; and participation in a trust game.  There is nothing in the results that goes against the literature or the our intuition, e.g. happiness is correlated with game events, or spending is correlated with happiness.  The whole enterprise comes across as a bit of fun.  There is a neat discussion of the methods.  It is well written and easy to follow.  The experiment might be related to important everyday topics but it is not that serious.  That is not always the case when examining the impact of sporting outcomes on decisions.

The contributors to this site have highlighted the darker implication of sporting outcomes and decisions, e.g. Declan Jordan discuss some of the literature on crime rates and sporting events (here and here).  My guess is that there will soon be an increase in the literature that examines domestic violence and sporting outcomes during the pandemic (when supporters were "forced" to watch games from home).  This literature uses decisions that are "naturally" occurring in everyday life rather than setting up an experiment.  The decisions occur in the "field" rather than in the "laboratory".

Another strand of this literature examines the statistical relationship between the decisions made by judges and the outcome of sporting events.  Imagine that today a judge is making a decision about a juvenile defendant.  One might hope that the decision is based on the fact of the case and the rule of law.  However, statistical evidence suggests it might depend on non-rule factors, e.g. if a prominent college, that the Judge's might identify with, has suffered an unexpected defeat.  This issue is examined in a 2018 (AEA) Applied Economics paper by Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan.  The authors use legal decisions for the period 1996 and 2012.  It is important to read paper like Eren and Mocan (2018) but it can be easier to read papers like Kessler et al (2021).

By Robbie Butler

There is probably no better place to start this week than the Ryder Cup. The 43rd match will commence this Friday at Whistling Straits, Wisconsin. The competition is easily the most anticipated team event in golf and probably matches, if not surpasses, the drama of the four Majors. The event also provides a unique atmosphere not normally witnessed in PGA or European Tour events, and is probably closer to a football match than a normal golfing occasion.

The history of the tournament is interesting and demonstrates how administrators and golf federations have altered the rules in order to keep the event interesting. The original match was not Europe versus the United States (US), but rather Great Britain vs the US. Prior to the Great Depression, both countries met for the inaugural Ryder Cup at the Worcester Country Club, Massachusetts in 1927, with the home team winning easily by 9½–2½. Britain would gain revenge two years later at Moortown Golf Club, Yorkshire winning by 7 points to 5. Seventeen more matches would be held between 1931 and 1971 but Great Britain would win just two, and never in the US.

In order to break a US winning streak of six Ryder Cup matches, starting in 1959, Ireland joined with Great Britain from 1973 (1969 was drawn). However, USA versus Great Britain and Ireland did little to improve balance, with the latter losing all three Ryder Cups in 1973, 1975 and 1977. 

With the US on a 9-match winning streak, Team Europe was formed for the 1979 Cup. While the US would win the next three matches, the winning streak did come to an end at the Belfrey in 1985 thanks to Tony Jacklin's team (unlucky 13 maybe). The tables below present the wins and home wins by team for all 42 Ryder Cups to date.

The change in competition design certainly appears to be working.

​Uncertainty of outcome, which was effectively eroded between 1959 and 1985 (1983 was a close run match), has been restored. If anything, Europe have dominated in recent years winning 9 of the last 14 matches. 3 of these European wins came on American soil.

The US on the other hand, have not won in Europe since 1993 at the Belfrey. With the next match not in Europe until 2023, it will be at least 30 years since an American win in Europe. It will be Italy's first time hosting the event and I am sure they will be trying to keep the European home win streak running.

By Robbie Butler

There was some disappointment locally this week when the Government announced further economic assessments were needed to assess whether Cork should bid to host the 37th Americas Cup.

The words "Ireland" and "hosting of an international sporting event" seems to appear in a ever-more frequent cycle  with the Summer Olympics Games, Ryder Cup, Euro 2008, the 2023 Rugby World, the 2030 FIFA World Cup (and there are more) all attached to Ireland in recent decades.

However, given the announcement this week, it seems some reflection is happening in the corridors of power and if the report below by New Zealand based Fresh Info on the most recent Americas Cup held in Auckland, New Zealand is anything to go by, the taxpayer might be about to avoid another bill. 

The report is a lengthy impact assessment of the most recent even held in Auckland, New Zealand. The Executive Summary reads as follows:
"This evaluation has identified a net benefit to Auckland of hosting the 36th America’s Cup (AC36) of -$91.6 million (benefit-cost ratio of 0.85) and a net benefit to New Zealand (including Auckland) of -$156.1 million (benefit-cost ratio of 0.79)."

The report continues:
"These figures are based on financial impacts (represented by actual or expected financial transactions) and non-financial impacts (unpriced social, cultural, or environmental effects). Focusing solely on financial impacts reveals a net benefit of -$145.8 million (benefit-cost ratio of 0.72) for Auckland and a net benefit of -$292.7 million (benefit-cost ratio of 0.48) for New Zealand (including Auckland). The financial impacts are the most relevant comparators with previous America’s Cup studies, including the original economic projection of the costs and benefits of hosting AC36 – which predicted a benefit-cost ratio for New Zealand of between 0.997 and 1.14."

It goes on to say:
"The number of international visitors was significantly lower than projected due to a lower-than-predicted number of Challengers and the COVID-19 border restrictions which prevented most non-essential visitors from entering New Zealand...Of the 281,329 attendees, 77.3% were from Auckland, 20.2% were from elsewhere in New Zealand (domestic visitors) and the remaining 2.4% were from overseas (international visitors)."

The full report can be found here.

By David Butler

Google Ngram Viewer was an application I was introduced to a few years back. While I think the software has been around for a decade or so now, its capabilities seem to have improved as Google incorporate more texts and deals with data quality issues.

Ngram allows you to chart the frequencies of words or phrases which have occurred in a corpus of books over a set time period. It could allow for interesting insights into the sociology of the discipline of economics and how cultural or linguistic changes occur.

The picture below is an obvious sports econ application that searches for the term ‘outcome uncertainty’ and ‘uncertainty of outcome’. This represents a yearly count of n-grams found in sources printed between 1956 and 2019. From 1994 to 2004 there is a noticeable increase in the trend for ‘uncertainty of outcome’. The use of the term has declined since. 

By Robbie Butler

Last Friday I was an invited contributor to The Conversation. The piece is based on an earlier version drafted below. 
The Conversation article can be found here.

In the early 1960s the chairman of Burnley Football Club, Bob Lord, successfully lobbied others in the Football League to prevent games being broadcast an Saturday afternoon. As a result, the “3pm Blackout” was born and exists to this very day.

Lord’s motivation was straightforward. He was worried televised football would negatively impact match attendance. He wasn’t alone in his thinking and other sports grappled with the same fear. For Lord, it was a simple demand and supply issue, for what he believed were substitute products.

He may have been correct. Almost all income generated by clubs in the early 1960s came from the turnstiles. There was no broadcasting revenue, and little or no merchandising and sponsorship. The thoughts of the North London Derby or Liverpool against Manchester United at 3pm on Saturday afternoon, broadcast live to a population with almost no access to sports content, were enough to convince Lord and others that the football business model could not survive with this form of competition.

Fast forward to 2021 and football in England could hardly be more different. The globalisation of the games since the late 1990s, has transformed many English towns and small cities into famous locations. Players and managers are now sourced from almost every country on the planet. The Premier League has become one of England’s best exports, with supporters arriving each weekend from around the globe to cheer on an adopted team.

The economics of the game have been transformed as well. No longer do top flight clubs like Burnley rely heavily on fans coming to games – although behind closed doors football did demonstrate how important fans are to the product – but rather broadcasting revenue, prizemoney, sponsorship and merchandising. Deloitte show that the joined revenues for the 20 Premier League club’s surpassed £5bn in 2018/2019.

While the past two seasons have been Covid-impacted and as a result seen revenues decline, the dropout has been insulated by the evolution of the way revenues are generated. For the elite clubs, matchday activity constitutes less than 20% of all revenue.

So the “3pm blackout” is not terribly important for Premier League clubs today. Especially, when fixtures played in this traditional slot normally constitute Premier League teams not in Europe and never a showcase fixtures, which are instead usually confined to Sunday afternoons.

But English football is far more than the Premier League. The depth of the oldest set of interconnected leagues in any sport on the planet is truly remarkable. While football strongholds such as Spain, Germany and Italy have two or three professional leagues, the English system can maintain professionalism six tiers down. Maybe further. The commitment and partisan nature of supporters and the communities these clubs exist in is what sustains this.

Unlike the elite clubs, the lower divisions do rely much more heavily on gate receipts, so much so that an argument can be made that those down the English football pyramid, still require the 3pm blackout. But does this make sense today?

I think not. The world has moved on since the 1960s. Premier League football is screened each Saturday at 12.30pm and 5.30pm. The lunchtime kick-off does not end until nearly 2.30pm. How many fans of lower league teams will decide not to travel to a game at 3pm because Ronaldo, Salah or Kane is live on television 30 minutes later? Very few I suspect. These players are regularly on television each Saturday yet the 2nd tier of English football (The Championship) is the 5th best attended league in all of Europe.

The television product and attending in person are no longer the substitute goods as Bob Lord feared in the 1960s, if they ever were. A plethora of options are available to people at 3pm on Saturday afternoon – both sport and non-sport – yet League 1 attendances average around 8,000 per game and League 2 just under 5,000 fans.

This is not to mention the possibility of watching 3pm kick-offs any way through streaming services or other means. Yet the Football League persists with a rule that was put in place when Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister, and long before the arrival of satellite television or the internet as we know it.

The irony of course is that it is possible to legally watch Saturday 3pm games outside of the UK so foreign fans of the Premier League actually get to consume more televised content that domestic supporters. And while the rest of the world will get to watch Ronaldo possibly reappear in a Manchester United jersey this Saturday, those living in and around Manchester without tickets to Old Trafford will have to wait until around 5pm to view streaming content or later that night for Match of the Day. A show almost as old as the “blackout” itself.

By David Butler

One possible way to consider how a combination of bad luck and/or poor finishing ability has affected a football team’s results is to consider the Xg statistics and how they differ from actual goals scored.

The table below shows goals and xG stats for Stephen Kenny’s Rep. of Ireland since the England friendly. These would indicate that Kenny has only suffered bad luck in two matches - Luxembourg and Wales. For both of these matches Ireland had a negative goal difference (lost the match) but had a positive Xg difference.

Although Ireland scored late to earn a point against Azerbaijan, the positive xG difference was 1.3, so there is a case of bad luck/bad finishing here too. For some matches we were quite lucky - for example the draw against Hungary. We were also lucky to score four against Andorra given the chances created.  

So, some recent results may be down to bad luck. I think bad finishing and often some needless shots from outside the box can explain some of the stats too. 

By John Considine

Over the course of the last year I have been fascinated by the changes in "local" sports broadcasting accelerated by the pandemic.  It illustrates the role of economic issues, at the most local of levels, in an amateur sporting organisation.  In the space of a few years, the debate about sports broadcasting has moved from broadcasting that targets hundreds of thousands at a national level to broadcasting that targets hundreds at a local level.

The media headlines to the right of this paragraph give a small flavour of the debate that took place around the sale of broadcast rights to a subscription broadcast service, i.e. Sky.  I have used the Michael Duignan quote in the image because he is probably better placed than most to understand the complexity of the issues and the competing interests.  As a teenager he arrived in Boston during the summer of 1987 and we played together on a team that won the North American championship.  Even at that stage it was possible to watch broadcasts of Irish gaelic games live in a Boston venue.  And we handed over dollars for the privilege.  By the time of the above quote, Duignan was a respected analyst on the National Broadcaster (RTE) - a broadcaster that "competed" with Sky for access to GAA games.  Currently, Duignan is Chairperson of Offaly GAA and was instrumental in securing sponsorship from the golfer Shane Lowry to help the county's finances (here).  He has experienced the economic issues from many angles.

It is worth giving a thumbnail sketch of events since March 2020.  Ireland officially acknowledged the arrival of the virus at the end of Q1 2020.  Sporting activities were halted.  Restrictions were eased as 2020 progressed into the summer and autumn.  Non-contact sporting activity returned where participants were limited to small pods.  Then contact practice and games returned.  This was followed by games involving county teams.  However, attendance at these outdoor sporting events were limited to 200 people.  This presented a problem for a sport heavily dependent on gate receipts.  Gone were those economic transactions where individuals handed over money for the right to see the game live and in-person.

It was fascinating to see the variety of responses.  Different groups found themselves confronting different circumstances and the solutions varied accordingly.  At a national level, the governing body opened up the pay-per-view possibility for supporters/consumers.  I have discussed this in a previous post (here).  At provincial level (4 provinces within the national level), the decision was made to do something similar with underage championship games.  I have discussed this in a previous post (here).  There is one important point to note about the broadcasting of these games.  It is that in many cases the cameras were already present in the grounds; recording footage to be broadcast as part of TV highlight shows.  The technological challenge came in moving the turnstyles online.

Things got a lot more complicated at lower levels.  Pre-pandemic only a small number of club games from some counties were broadcast on television.  Again, there was the capacity for a small increase in live streaming because of the presence of cameras recording footage for highlights packages.  It looks like some enterprising counties arranged their schedules to increase their revenues from these sources.  Other counties sought to allocate the broadcasting rights to media organisations.  It is only a slight exaggeration to say that arrangements ran into the issues covered in the landmark case involving UEFA's sale of broadcast rights to the Champions League (here).  The problems arose with the games that were not sold/broadcast.  In both cases, the potential broadcasting/streaming of these games were eventually facilitated.

​Once the way was cleared for local responses, there was an element of the "Dunkirk" spirit to the efforts as communities sought to transport their troops home via all sort of technological vehicles.  Clubs who might be at each other's throats on the field were sharing the costs involved off the field.  Those who previously recorded these games for the purpose of performance analysis, upskilled their camera work to include closer action angles and they became experts on the best equipment and platforms for streaming.  Those previously engaged in recording religious events got involved and, in their case, they had to learn to use wider angles to capture more than happy/sad faces.  A host of amateur commentators and analysts joined the fray.  Some clubs would carry slightly more of the cost so that their person could act as commentator.  The local commentator would "add value" to the broadcast with information about a player's gene pool, a player's recent receipt of their academic results, and identification of the local faces that were among the lucky 200.  This identification with local issues was reflected in the sponsors who covered the cost of the broadcasts.

I wondered what would happen to the cameras and the dongles if/when the spectator restrictions were eased.  Others were also reflecting on the experience and the implications for overall GAA broadcasting policy.  Paul Rouse outlined these issues in a thought-provoking pieces from last November (here).  While Rouse mainly deals with national issues, he also deals with the local issues.  Here are his words.  "Even before the Covid crisis, there were clubs and organisations in Ireland live-streaming their own sporting events and trying to get people to buy passes on-line.  But, as history reveals time and again, one of the things that crises do is to accelerate change that is already underway."  Last week, nine months after Rouse's prescient words, a minor local spat broke out between a club and the county organisation (as illustrated in the image below).

Last year I watched some of these streamed offerings.  I was struck by the relatively large number of people who viewed them compared to the numbers that would normally have attended the live event.  At the time I was also reading Brian Goff's book called Sports Economics Uncut.  In one of the chapters, Goff explained how local broadcasting helped increase attendances at Major League Baseball.  Could something similar happen for gaelic games and/or is there a separate untapped online market?  Earlier this year I talked to a few people in an attempt to understand the phenomenon.  I did not get an answer to my question but I learned a lot.  For example, both "producers" and "consumers" upskilled during pandemic.  It seems my concern about the technological capabilities of older GAA followers were largely unfounded as this cohort had upskilled to keep in contact with family and to tune into local religious services.  The willingness to pay was also larger than I had expected.  One county pulled in thousands of euro by charging €5 to attend a club player of the year event.  Clubs are less capable of monitising events due to a shortage of these technological skills - although they are convinced there is a cohort who will not attend in person and are willing to pay for a streamed service..

How will local sports broadcasting evolve?  I don't know but the pandemic has changed attitudes to the possibilities.  The change in the attitudes to broadcasting will be important.  And it is not just sports broadcasting  As I was drafting this blog post I got an email from a colleague who is concerned about the presence of cameras in the teaching space.  His concerns are familiar and mirror those in the sporting world.  He is concerned about the impact on in-person attendances.  He is concerned about his ability to monitise his product (whether from his material being appropriated or his utterances being misconstrued).  However, students who were forced to view material online in 2020-21 want the option of access to online material in 2021-22.  Many will return to in-person teaching spaces.  In my opinion, students will do so more to experience the social side than the learning experience.  However, they want the option of viewing the event online - even if it is not live.  Something similar already happens with national GAA events.  Many spectators will return from the live event to watch the highlights programme on TV (The Sunday Game).  Something similar will surely happen with local sporting events.

By Ed Valentine

23 years ago this week Ireland played Croatia at Lansdowne Road. Croatia went into the game as slight favourites coming off the back of a narrow defeat to World Champions France in that summer’s World Cup semi final. Goals from the Man Utd duo of Irwin and Keane gave the boys in green a comfortable 2-0 victory. It marked a time when the lion’s share of the squad played week in week out in the Premier League with many of the starting XI also playing in mid week European competition. Just one player, Keith O’ Neill of Norwich, in the starting line-up that day played outside of the topflight. Despite this Ireland were competitive against the likes of Juventus’ Igor Tudor and Parma & later Chelsea’s Mario Stanic. My memory of the day is that we outplayed the Croats for large parts of the match.
 
Contrast this with the starting XI which played Portugal this week. With an average age of 25 Stephen Kenny’s men failed to hold on to a 1-0 lead away to Portugal with Ronaldo stepping up to end Irish hopes of a famous victory. Although Coleman & co. led for much of the second half, Portugal had most of the chances and possession.
 
What’s especially painful is that the future is looking bleak. As it stands the 11 players who kicked off in white shirts last night have a total of 59 games of European club competition appearances under their belts, most of which are Europa League preliminary round qualifiers. Dennis Irwin in his entire career had 75 European appearances, many of which were in the Champions League. Eddie McGoldrick (“who is he?” some younger readers may ask) managed 11 European club appearances and picked up a European Cup Winners Cup medal for Arsenal. 55% of the experience among the line up has been gained in the lower tiers of English football. Some have come in the form of SPFL
 
The table below demonstrates the collective experience of the starting line-up against Portugal. The numbers are worrying. 

​Only for Seamus Coleman, at 32 will not have that much of an international career left to run, who brings 302 Premier League appearances to the table.

​It’s a far cry from the days of home victories against Croatia and the Dutch – many of our players on the pitch either weren’t born or were too young to remember those days.