Stefan Szymanski

The English Football Industry: profit, performance and industrial structure

The English (Association) Football League is a long-established industrial cartel selling a highly popular product with only imperfect substitutes. Despite that, the majority of its member clubs lose money and the industry has faced successive financial crises over the last decade. This chapter develops an empirical model of the financial performance of English League clubs using a high-quality data set of 48 clubs over the period 1974—89. The underlying model explains how rents are competed away through the maximising behaviour of club owners subject to production constraints. This model is parameterised by a system of equations which describe the behaviour of a maximising owner subject to demand and production constraints. The model is then used to examine the coordination failure which lies at the heart of the English Football League’s decline and to assess the prospects for the Premier League.

Testing Causality Between Team Performance and Payroll The Cases of Major League Baseball and English Soccer

The link between team payroll and competitive balance plays a central role in the theory of team sports but is seldom investigated empirically. This paper uses data on team payrolls in Major League Baseball between 1980 and 2000 to examine the link and implements Granger causality tests to establish whether the relationship runs from payroll to performance or vice versa. While there is no evidence that causality runs from payroll to performance over the entire sample period, the data shows that the cross section correlation between payroll and performance increased significantly in the 1990s. As a comparison, the paper examines the relationship between pay and performance in English soccer, and it is shown that Granger causality from higher payrolls to better performance cannot be rejected. We argue that this difference may be a consequence of the open market for player talent that obtains in soccer compared to the significant restrictions on trade that exist in Major League Baseball.

A Market Test for Discrimination in the English Professional Soccer Leagues

This paper proposes a market test for racial discrimination in salary setting in English league soccer over the period 1978–93 using a balanced panel of 39 clubs. If there is a competitive market for the services of players, the wage bill of the club will reflect their productivity and hence the performance of the club in the league. Discrimination can be said to exist if clubs fielding an above‐average proportion of black players systematically outperform clubs with a below‐average proportion of black players, after one controls for the wage bill. Statistically significant evidence of discrimination in this sense is found.

The economic impact of the world cup.

The World Cup will be the biggest sporting event of 2002, but the Japanese and Korean governments are also hoping that it will be one of the biggest economic events of the year. Impact studies by respected economic research institutes predict a dramatic boost to GDP in both countries. This paper explains how these forecasts are generated and explains the tendency for such forecasts to be over-optimistic. The paper concludes with some policy recommendations for governments and sporting bodies considering hosting such events.

Professional Team Sports Are Only a Game: The Walrasian Fixed-Supply Conjecture Model, Contest-Nash Equilibrium, and the Invariance Principle

This article explores the standard 2-team model of talent choice in a professional sports league and argues that the application of Nash concepts leads to a different equilibrium than that which is normally identified. In particular, it is shown that the invariance principle for gate-revenue sharing no longer holds. Because the standard model, which is here called the Walrasian fixed-supply conjecture model, is widely taught in sports management and economics programs, these finding have important implications for teachers as well as researchers.

Privatization, Liberalization, Wages and Employment: Theory and Evidence for the UK

Most agency-based privatization models are of the owner/manager relation and ignore the labor market. Yet in the 1980s there were profound changes in public sector and privatized firms to wages and employment. The authors develop a bargaining model of the manager/workforce relation that explains employment and wages when firms are privatized, government objectives become more commercial, and markets are liberalized. Using data on fourteen U.K. companies, 1972-88, that were publicly owned in 1972, the authors find: (1) employment fell following the change to more commercial objectives; and (2) wages were only slightly affected by this, but fell if the firm lost market power. Copyright 1993 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Spatial dependence through local yardstick competition:: theory and testing

Abstract We propose a model of contracting for natural monopolies in which yardstick evaluation of performance can be optimal. Where principals have partially unobservable objective functions and agents are risk averse an externality is generated which can be observed in patterns of spatial dependence. Imposing standard contracting rules on principals can eliminate the externality and spatial dependence. We test this prediction using spatial econometrics on UK data covering a regime shift from independent contracting to compulsory competitive tendering rules.

Broadcasting, Attendance and the Inefficiency of Cartels

The English Premier League is a cartel of soccer teams that collectively sells the rights to broadcast its matches. Despite considerable demand for their product from broadcasters, the clubs agreed to sell only a small fraction of the broadcast rights (60 out of 380 matches played each season between 1992 and 2001). The clubs have explained this reluctance by claiming that increased broadcasting would reduce attendance at matches and therefore reduce cartel income. However, this paper produces detailed econometric evidence to show that broadcasting has a negligible effect on attendance and that additional broadcast fees would be likely to exceed any plausible opportunity cost. The paper concludes that a more likely explanation for the reluctance to market their rights is the failure of the cartel to reach agreement on compensation for individual teams.

The financial crisis in European football - an introduction.

Is there currently a crisis in European professional football? Surely there exists a common set of problems afflicting clubs, with negative financial implications for all. Moreover, a crisis in one large club or group of clubs threatens to damage the financial stability of other clubs. This introduction reviews the financial crises in football in several European countries, searches for common explanations of these crises, and proposes a few solutions, ranging from tighter financial regulation to the restructuring of competition, with the aim of easing the financial burden for smaller clubs in particular.

Modelling the spatial impact of the introduction of Compulsory Competitive Tendering

Abstract This paper uses data on local authority garbage collection costs to measure the spatial impact of the shift from local in-house monopoly provision to Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT). The data shows that before CCT service costs were correlated across authorities after controlling for their characteristics. However, following CCT this spatial correlation disappears or is significantly attenuated. We associate this change with the way in which contracts were written before and after CCT. We also show that political factors were an important factor in determining costs both before and after CCT.