Articles in this issue:

• The Impact of Video Coverage on Football Bowl Subdivision Attendance

  Gregory A. Falls and Paul A. Natke

  Panel data of 2,243 regular season games for Football Bowl Subdivision teams during 2007-09 are used to examine the relationship between the extent of video coverage and stadium utilization. Results suggest that an advertising effect overwhelms a substitution effect generated by video coverage. After controlling for other variables, national video coverage has a significant and large positive impact on attendance as a percent-age of stadium capacity, but the magnitude of this effect decreases as temperatures rise. Local coverage has a small positive impact only when a temperature-coverage...Read more

• Determinants of Russian Football Club Brands

  Dennis Coates

  Iulia Naidenova

  and Petr Parshakov

  Using data from the Russian Premier League, this paper estimates brand strength of a football club as the effect that club has on attendance when it is the visiting team. This objective measure of sports club brand contrasts with the subjective, survey-based measures common in the literature. The analysis then turns to the determinants of this measure of brand, tracking its evolution across seasons and relating it to the history of success of the club. The results confirm that greater success raises brand strength and that brand does not depreciate quickly over time.Read more

• Revenue Sharing in Professional Sports Leagues as a Hedge for Exchange Rate Risk

  Duane W. Rockerbie and Stephen T. Easton

  Professional sports leagues that feature teams in different countries with different currencies are exposed to exchange rate uncertainty and risk. This is particularly evident for three professional sports leagues that feature teams in the United States and Cana-da. We construct a simple model of a profit-maximizing team that earns its revenue in one currency and meets its payroll obligations in a second currency and participates in a league-imposed revenue-sharing plan. Team profit can increase or decrease due to movements in the exchange rate based on a simple condition. Revenue sharing...Read more

• An Inquiry into Wage Discrimination Based on Nationality: The Case of the Korean Baseball Organization

  Jye-Shyan Wang

  Pei-Hsin Fang

  and Tsong-Min Wu

  This study analyzes wage discrimination in the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis was used to analyze panel data covering 775 first-team baseball players, teams’ annual attendance, team records, and home city populations in the KBO from 2001 to 2010. The study results showed that wage discrimination based on nationality occurred in the KBO. Both foreign pitchers and foreign position players were paid significantly higher salaries than South Korean players with similar performance records. We also found that the number of foreign pitchers...Read more

• Profiting from the English Premier League: Predictive Elicitation, the Kelly Criterion, and Black Swans

  Andrés Ramírez Hassan and Mateo Graciano Londoño

  We present a complete betting strategy for football (soccer), and develop a free graphical user interface to apply it. We use betting odds to elicit the hyperparameters of our prior distributions that are mixed with historical records to estimate the probability of each outcome. Forecast probabilities are used to define the optimal bet size based on the Kelly Criterion and we establish a stopping rule for betting, based on atypical positive returns (referred to as “black swans”). We apply our method to the English Premier League, obtaining profits equal to 33.54%, 22.12%, and 49.01% for...Read more