Vincent Hogan and Patrick Massey

Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), one of France’s top soccer clubs, was bought by Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) in 2011. Since then, the club’s expenditure has risen precipitously, as have its victories. In this paper, we ask whether this represents value for money. We find that the efficiency of PSG did not deteriorate following the takeover. However, while PSG operated close to the production frontier in terms of converting resources to points, it scored vastly more points than was necessary to win the league. We estimate that PSG spent €140m more than was necessary to win the French league in...Read more

Wladimir Andreff

A first European Conference in Sports Economics (ECSE) had been convened at the Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne of the University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, September 14-15, 2009. Out of about 60 submitted papers, 32 had been selected and sampled into eight topics and sessions: the economics of professional team sports leagues; economic dimensions of sport participation; sport financing and governance; professional sports and markets; the economic impact of sport mega-events; labor market in professional sports; sport efficiency; and regulation and competitive balance in professional...Read more