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. 

By David Butler

To say that the Ireland World Cup qualifier against Portugal tonight has had a low key build up would be an understatement. I can’t recall a competitive international match against elite opponents that has received such little media attention.

Irelands quality and current performance in the group has a lot to do with this. Ireland are 15/1 to win the match. Taking account of the bookies take, that means that we have about a 6% chance of a victory. I can't recall our senior team being involved in such an unbalanced match where Ireland were the underdogs. 

Ireland’s current demise can be summed up by looking at the end of the chart below. This is our ELO ranking. These ratings cover the time period from 1988 until present. The ELO rating system was adapted from chess and scores soccer teams based on performance. Among a range of factors, points are awarded based on the type of match played (qualifier/friendly etc.), home advantage, opponent quality, goal difference and expected results.

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."