Articles in this issue:

  • Troels Troelsen

    UEFA is the sports governing body for football (soccer) in Europe with 53 national associations as members of a democratic organization. UEFA is also the most important member of FIFA, which is the international governing body for football. UEFA organizes all European Championships and Youth Championships, as well as two trans-European playoffs every year between the best teams from the national leagues. The better teams from the 53 national leagues are, with some playoffs for the positions, playing in these two leagues. And the better the teams from a national league are performing, the...Read more

  • Anthony C. Krautmann
    Peter von Allmen
    David Berri

    In this paper,we consider whether underpaying players restricted by the reserve clause is a common practice in the three largest sports leagues in North America—the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that owners of professional sports teams do exercise monopsony power whenever and wherever they can. Although differences exist across the three sports, our results indicate that in general: restricted players are underpaid; when the negotiating power of players rises, owners are less able to extract a surplus; and, the greatest surplus tends to be extracted from...Read more

  • Phillip A. Miller

    This paper examines the franchise values of American professional sports teams in the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL. It is argued that team franchise values depend on the ownership status of the facility in which the team plays. If a team owns its playing facility, it capitalizes the value of the facility in the team franchise value, driving the latter higher. If a team plays in a facility owned by another entity, the franchise value should be lower. The empirical evidence suggests that the franchise values of NFL and NHL teams are higher for teams that own their playing facilities. No such...Read more

  • R. Todd Jewell

    This study estimates a demand curve for physically aggressive play in the English Premier Football League (EPL), the highest level of professional association football (soccer) in England. Employing a league-point-maximization framework in which a team chooses its level of aggressive play as an input, optimum aggressive play is assumed to respond to its price, where price is the reduction in the probability of a win or a tie resulting from aggressive play. The results indicate that aggressive play by EPL teams, as measured by total disciplinary points, is responsive to opportunity cost for...Read more

  • Stefan Kesenne

    In this theoretical analysis, we try to find out what the impact is of pooling and sharing, and not just the sharing of broadcast rights, on the competitive balance in a sports league. We are using a simplified 2-club non-cooperative Nash equilibrium model with the hiring of talent as the only decision variable. The conclusion is that the individual sale of broadcast rights, combined with a pure performance-related sharing arrangement of the money, offers the best guarantee for an improvement of the competitive balance.Read more