Articles in this issue:

• Performance, Salaries and Contract Length: Empirical Evidence from German Soccer, pp. 87-118

  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

• I Don’t Care If I Never Get Back? Time, Travel Costs, and the Estimation of Baseball Season-Ticket Demand, pp. 119-137

  Jahn K. Hakes

  Chad Turner

  Kyle Hutmaker

  Many previous attempts to estimate attendance demand for sporting events have concluded that teams with market power are nonetheless pricing tickets in the inelastic portion of the demand curve. These studies, however, have suffered from problems with price and seat quality measurement, multiproduct pricing strategies, and simultaneity in prices and quantities. Using geographically-specific sales data for Atlanta Braves season tickets and multigame ticket packages, we estimate demand for attendance by adopting the travel-cost methodology used in the non-market valuation literature. Using...Read more

• Country-Specific Goal-Scoring in the ‘Dying Seconds’ of International Football Matches, pp. 138-154

  Jan C. van Ours

  Martin A. van Tuijl

  This paper investigates whether there are country-specific characteristics in goal scoring in the final stage of important international football matches. We examine goal scoring, from 1960 onwards, in full ‘A’ international matches of eight national teams: Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. We analyze qualifying matches for the European Championship and World Cup and the matches at the final tournaments of these two events, as well as at the Copa América. We find that Argentina, Germany, and Italy are more likely than the other national teams...Read more

• Willingness-to-Pay in Non-Profit Sports Clubs, pp. 155-169

  Pamela Wicker

  In Germany, some sports clubs increasingly encounter financial problems due to decreasing public subsidies. A way to compensate for the decrease is to increase membership fees. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyze members’ willingness-topay (WTP) for membership fees and to identify determinants of WTP. For this study, active, adult members (n = 10,013) in 21 sports were surveyed. The results show that members paid an average annual membership fee of 148 and stated an average WTP of 265. The consumer surplus for all sports amounted to 113 on average. The results of the...Read more

• The Hope Statistic as an Alternative Measure of Competitive Balance, pp. 170-184

  Alan Kaplan

  John Nadeau

  Norm O’Reilly

  We examine the need for and the presence of competitive balance in professional sports leagues. We argue that competitive balance helps to further fan welfare and we propose a new measure of competitive balance that hopefully better reflects the needs of fans—that is, compared with measures used both currently and in the past. More specifically, we model the hope of postseason play in a new way as a proxy for competitive balance, and, using a database from Major League Baseball, we provide descriptive statistics for our measure alongside a number of other measures currently extant in the...Read more