Egon Franck

The new UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations have encountered stiff criticism. The concerns are that the new regulations may harm football in three different ways: By forgoing the potential benefits from substantial injections of “external” money into payrolls, by restricting competition in the player market without at the same time achieving benefits from more balanced competition, and by creating some sort of barrier to entry which could “freeze” the current hierarchy of clubs. It is the purpose of this paper to take these concerns as a starting point for discussing...Read more

Bernd Frick

The recent transfers of Christiano Ronaldo from Manchester United, and of Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite (Kaká) from Associazione Calcio Milan to Real Madrid—as well as the increasing financial problems of many of the top teams in the big five European leagues—have again increased the public’s attention for the global football players’ labor market. Therefore, the paper addresses two important, and highly contested, issues: player remuneration and contract duration (players are usually considered as overpaid and poorly motivated. Using two different unbalanced panels from the German...Read more

Mark Koyama
J. James Reade

Home advantage in football varies over time. Existing theories of home advantage struggle to explain this time-series variation. We argue that the decline in home advantage in English football since the mid-1980s was partly caused by the advent of televised football. We argue that the increase in live television coverage of football matches has worked to incentivize players to not to shirk when playing in away games, as supporters can now more effectively monitor their efforts. We test this hypothesis using both time-series and panel-data econometrics.Read more