Articles in this issue:

• NFL Betting Biases, Profitable Strategies, and the Wisdom of the Crowd

  Corey A. Shank

  I find that betting biases in the NFL market extend beyond preferring the favorite and the over. The results show that the percentage of wagers on the favorite team increases as more bettors place wagers, bettors have a preference for betting against the line movement, and they prefer to bet on the favorite when the away team has lost recent games. Furthermore, bettors have a nonlinear preference in the point spread betting, as they are less likely to wager on the favorite when the spread is small or large. In the totals market, bettors wager the over when the home team has covered the...Read more

• Factors that Shape the Demand for International Football Games Across Different Age Groups

  Andreas Bergmann

  Dominik Schreyer

  In recent years, the composition of revenue sources has changed substantially for professional football clubs, thereby leading to a significant dependency on broadcasting income. Accordingly, economists, traditionally more interested in the economic analysis of football stadium attendances, have begun turning their attention to the potential determinants of television audience demand in professional football. Despite this rapidly increasing interest of economists in exploring the determinants of football TV demand, there is, however, little empirical evidence on the stability of such...Read more

• A Market Test for Ethnic Discrimination in Major League Soccer

  Craig Kerr

  This paper tests for salary discrimination based on player ethnicities in Major League Soccer (MLS) with a market model. Particular focus is paid to Club Deportivo Chivas USA, which was operated by owners of a Mexican team that explicitly excludes non-Mexicans from their roster, Club Deportivo Guadalajara. Evidence of wage discrimination in MLS is found and the model is used to estimate how much of Chivas USA’s poor performance was due to discrimination.

  doi.org/10.32731/IJSF.141.022019.02Read more

• Jumping in the Pool: What Determines Which Players the NBA Considers in the Draft?

  Tiffany Greer

  Joshua A. Price

  and David J. Berri

  Each year the National Basketball Association (NBA) drafts a small number of college players from a very large pool of potential college talents. This purpose of this study is to explore how NBA decision-makers decide which players are in the group of selected players. The reported results confirm—as prior studies have indicated—that points scored dominates the evaluation of playing talent. In addition, evidence also suggests that decision makers have trouble separating the player from the college team that employs the player.

  doi.org/10.32731/IJSF.141.022019.04Read more

• Insolvencies in Professional Football: A German Sonderweg?

  Stefan Szymanski and Daniel Weimar

  There is a common perception that the German football system is financially more stable than other European football league systems. However, we show that the German football pyramid is no more immune to the problem of insolvency than other European football league pyramids. We provide evidence to show that insolvency occurs in German football at a frequency comparable to the English and French leagues. We also show that the pattern of insolvency is consistent with the experience of English and French football identified in Szymanski (2017) and Scelles et al. (2018). Using season-level...Read more