It would seem that the abundant supply of cheap labour for European football clubs and the poverty, from which football offers a hope of escape, combine to create a situation where this shameful development in the wealthiest game in the world can progress almost unnoticed. This is also not a recent problem as a report in Spiegel showed in 2010.
A remarkable television programme on Irish national station, RTE, last night looked at the plight of up to 20,000 young African footballers that have been defrauded by illegal agents to come to play football in Europe and subsequently being abandoned to fend for themselves on the streets of European cities.
It would seem that the abundant supply of cheap labour for European football clubs and the poverty, from which football offers a hope of escape, combine to create a situation where this shameful development in the wealthiest game in the world can progress almost unnoticed. This is also not a recent problem as a report in Spiegel showed in 2010.
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By John Considine During my gaelic football playing days I had the perverse pleasure of listening to strange conversation between our full-back and a member of the management team. Our full-back had problems with his ankles during the season. As a result, he had taken to wearing ankle-high rugby boots to support his ankle. The player was explaining the advantages and disadvantages of the rugby boots to the member of the management team. The full-back said the main disadvantage of the rugby boots was he got no direction with his clearances. The member of the management team did not see that as a disadvantage. He said to the player “You are a defender. What direction do you need on your clearances?” It seems that less is expected of players in such defensive roles. I was reminded of this story when I read a paper by Alex Bryson, Bernd Frick and Rob Simmons that was published in the December 2013 issue of the Journal of Sports Economics. The authors think a little like the member of the management team as I will explain later. In a previous posting (here) I presented the results from the paper. The paper examines the difference in salaries for players depending on whether they are predominantly right-footed, left-footed, or able to play equally well with both feet. The authors found there was a premium for players that were equally good with both feet. The paper offers some wonderful ideas for discussion. The authors present their ideas when motivating their study and discussing their results. Some of the reasons they suggest might lead two-footed players to be paid a premium are likely to get some opposition, as well support, from football fans. There is a discussion about the relationship between mental and physical characteristics. One could fill an off-season with the possibilities!!! The authors rely on a paper by Kevin Denny and Vincent O’Sullivan that discusses the relationship between handedness and IQ. They proceed to link handedness to footedness and link IQ to sporting intelligence. This is super conversation material for sports fans. It might help explain why we hear commentators talk about players having “an educated left foot” but rarely hear about a player having "an educated right foot”. (One of the paper’s author is no stranger to the examining the link between measures of intelligence and sporting ability. A widely cited paper by Rob Simmons and David Berri examined the predictive power of the Wonderlic IQ test used on NFL quarterbacks.) Another talking point from the 2013 Journal of Sports Economics paper is the claim that footedness is not important for goalkeepers. Bryson, Frick and Simmons classify players as defenders, forwards, goalkeepers, and midfielders. However, goalkeepers are dropped from their analysis. Why? According to the authors, “goalkeepers are excluded as footedness is not especially relevant for their performance”. Because of the availability bias, fans are likely to point to the high profile goalkeeping mistakes from a week ago – although both mistakes are not really about footedness. Southampton’s Artur Boruc gets his feet mixed up (view it here). Spurs Hugo Lloris has a poor clearance a couple of seconds into their game against Manchester City (view it here). Let us return to the way the authors model defenders. Although the authors clearly say that being adept with both feet is an advantage, they do say there are some positions in which “being a predominately one-footed player could be an advantage”. The positions the authors list as possibly benefiting from a one-sided player are left-back and right-back. Why would a left-back or right-back be better off being predominately one-footed? Surely it is an unambiguous advantage to be two-footed. A two-footed player can do all the things a one-footed player can do. And, they can do a bit more. So why can't the authors avoid the trap of claiming that a one-footed player might have an advantage in these defensive positions? I believe it arises from the common perception of the mental capacity of defenders. Rather than trusting the defender to make to appropriate decision about what foot to use (and associated decisions) the common perception is that the defender can't make these decisions correctly. Maybe a two-footed defender is over confident and misjudges the risk-return trade-off. This would explain why a well-worn phrase in sport is "Keep it simple, Stupid". By Paul O'Sullivan An article in Friday’s New York Times outlines the financing of Met Life Stadium in New Jersey, home of the NFL’s Giants and Jets from New York. While the stadium itself may not have been directly paid for with public money, the teams were granted state-owned land in return for a relatively small annual payment as well as other benefits that had previously gone into state coffers. Also, the state spent over $250 million on infrastructure projects that may not have occurred in the absence of the new stadium. Any money that is transferred from public to private bodies is effectively a subsidy, while there is also the opportunity cost as the money could have been spent on something else. One of the arguments for building the stadium was that it would be able to host a Superbowl, which it will do on February 2nd, and that this will have spillover benefits for the state, particularly in terms of an influx of fans and media from outside the NY/NJ area. Economists are generally sceptical about the extent of such spillovers, and many studies have shown that such spillovers are almost always much lower than promised. Proponents of using public money to host major sporting events usually base their support on a commissioned report that predicts massive economic benefits to the local area. In the case of the NY/NJ Superbowl, the host committee has refused to publish the economic impact report. If past experience of such reports is anything to go by, the expected benefits are likely to be over-stated while the expected costs will be under-stated. The use of terms like ‘economic impact’ and ‘generate economic activity’ usually give the game away as to the true impact of hosting such large events like the Superbowl, Olympics and World Cup. In terms of investing public money, what really matters is the net effect of hosting an event, not the gross effect. It would be terrible for anybody to think that Irish politicians and vested sporting and business interests would ever engage in this type of behaviour in order to attract a major sporting event to this country. |
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