Palgrave Pivots in Sports Economics – serie

This Palgrave Pivot provides a comprehensive overview of economic aspects to criminal behaviour in sport. It addresses manipulations, dysfunctions, distortions and crimes triggered by economic interests or pure greed in sports, and challenges the governance of this important industry. Topics covered include hazing, sabotage, refereeing bias, technological manipulations, tanking, bad management, financial doping, ticket touting, circumventing the law through sport, discrimination and child labour.The book is divided into three volumes. Volume I covers those economic manipulations that breach sports rules, sporting integrity, violate managerial rules and the law, and infringe human rights in sport. It builds up a typology of sport manipulations which makes sense from an economic standpoint, not only from a sporting or judicial perspective.Volumes II and III (available separately) focus on Corruption and Economic Crime in Sport, respectively.This book will be of interest to students, researchers and journalists in sports science, sports management and sports economics.

This Palgrave Pivot surveys facts and cases exhibiting and exemplifying corruption in sport. The standard economic theory (economics of crime, game theory) is introduced alongside the economic methods (sanctions, etc.) which are currently derived from it to combat corrupt sport and their limitations. The complexity and multidimensional nature of sports corruption are examined, and a focus is applied to certain types of corruption that are unique to the sports industry. Corruption is revealed to be the outcome of weak and deficient governance structures.The book is divided into three volumes. Volume II presents a variety of corruption facts in different sports, in different countries and continents in order to exhibit how much corrupt sport is globalised. Some changes in governance are suggested that may pave the way to more effective combat against corruption in sports.Volumes I and III (available separately) address Sport Manipulations and EconomicCrime in Sport, respectively.This book will be of interest to students, researchers and journalists in sports science, sports management and sports economics.

This Palgrave Pivot forms the final part of Andreff's trilogy reviewing the economic aspects of criminal behaviour in sports. In this volume, Andreff focuses on the most economically significant manipulations jeopardising the future of current, modern, sport: rigged online sport betting and doping. The former is framed as a new business undertaken by global criminal networks linked to economic globalisation, whilst the latter discusses empirical evidence, definitions, regulations and various regional and sporting case studies. Andreff summarises by using game theory to propose a new incentive scheme that could act as a solution for addressing such criminal activity in future. Volumes I and II (available separately) address Sport Manipulations and Corruption in Sport respectively.This book will be of interest to students, researchers and journalists in sports science, sports management and sports economics.

The Super Bowl is the most watched sporting event in the United States. But what does participating in this event mean for the players, the halftime performers, and the cities who host the games?  Is there an economic benefit from being a part of the Super Bowl and if so, how much?This Palgrave Pivot examines the economic consequences for those who participate in the Super Bowl. The book fills in gaps in the literature by examining the benefits and costs of being involved in the game. Previously, the literature has largely ignored the affect the game has had on the careers of the players, particularly the stars of the game. The economic benefit of being the halftime performer has not been considered in the literature at all. While there have been past studies about the economic impact on the cities who host of the game, this book will expand on previous research and update it with new data.

This Palgrave Pivot re-examines salary formation in Major League Baseball in light of real option theory to clarify the connection between salary and marginal revenue product for professional baseball players. Current literature has tended to treat single-year and multi-year contracts similarly, ignoring the potential option value for teams and for players. Recent work points to the observation that both high-productivity and low-productivity athletes have salaries that systematically differ from their marginal revenue product, and that free agents signing multi-year contracts are overpaid relative to free agents signing one-year contracts. This book argues that the value of signing an athlete to a contract should be determined similarly to the determination of the value of an investment project or a financial asset. This book demonstrates how to calculate the value of real options to the player and the team owner with a simple two-year contract, and offers extensions to the realoptions model for multiyear contracts or when a player is early or late in his career.

This Palgrave Pivot presents tournament design mainly within the axioms of incentive compatibility and fairness. It illustrates the advantages of an axiomatic approach through various examples, including several FIFA and UEFA tournaments, and uses theoretical tools and simulation methodology in its analysis. Chapter 1 discusses scoring systems of championships with multiple competitions, ranking in Swiss-system tournaments, and tie-breaking rules in round-robin leagues. It is followed by a thorough critical analysis of the current and previous FIFA World Rankings. The broad focus is substantially narrowed in Chapter 2, which turns to the topic of incentive (in)compatibility in multiple qualifiers. It is revealed that UEFA has faced at least three times recently this problem in the qualification to the UEFA Europa League, qualification to the UEFA Champions League, and the draw of the UEFA Champions League groups. Analogously, Chapter 3 discusses incentive (in)compatibility when there is only one group-based tournament but the complex progression rules to the subsequent stage can be designed poorly. Our examples include the qualifying tournaments of recent FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships. Chapter 4 moves to the problem of penalty shootout rules in soccer, where the fairness and complexity of some alternative mechanisms from the literature are evaluated. Fairness remains the central issue in Chapter 5, which presents the challenges of designing a tournament with 24 teams if the number of teams per group cannot exceed four. As expected, there is no perfect solution, and both FIFA and UEFA have introduced a reform in this format recently. Chapter 6 deals with the qualification for the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship. Its tournament design is perhaps the most complicated one that has ever been implemented in the real-world and suffers from serious shortcomings.

This book analyzes the 2018 and 2019 men's and women's World Cups to understand how the use of Video Assistant Referees (VAR) affected each tournament. Unlike goal technology, where the decision is entirely left to the machine's algorithm, the VAR still has a human component, making it prone to errors and controversies. Building on the theories of justice, the book quantitatively reviews event-level data while using a historical perspective to depict a novel approach to the effects of VAR in major soccer tournaments. The six chapters examine the use of VAR, discuss when it was not used (but maybe should have been used), and explore how the World Cup evolved with the new technology. Combining the VAR events of 2018 and 2019 with comparable situations from past World Cups guides the reader into debating the meaning of justice and the potential of ever achieving fairness in soccer.

This book provides a new and unique perspective on ideas of demand within sports economics. It reviews the methodologies that underpin the current analysis of the demand for sporting events, highlights their limitations, and proposes ways in which they can be improved. By proposing a new framework that takes approaches from behavioural economics, socio-economics and open-systems methodology, a new perspective is proposed that deepens our understanding of the demand for sporting events and is presented as a research strategy that embraces qualitative and mixed methods.This book offers insight into a key economic idea through the lens of sports economics and the attendance of sporting events. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in sports economics and the political economy of sport.

This book provides a new and unique perspective on ideas of demand within sports economics. It reviews the methodologies that underpin the current analysis of the demand for sporting events, highlights their limitations, and proposes ways in which they can be improved. By proposing a new framework that takes approaches from behavioural economics, socio-economics and open-systems methodology, a new perspective is proposed that deepens our understanding of the demand for sporting events and is presented as a research strategy that embraces qualitative and mixed methods.This book offers insight into a key economic idea through the lens of sports economics and the attendance of sporting events. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in sports economics and the political economy of sport.

College graduates do not benefit economically from the intercollegiate athletic programs of their alma mater.Students provide substantial funding for their institution’s intercollegiate athletic programs via tuition and fees. In fact, a typical student is required to pay for such activities. Will this financial burden paid for during undergraduate years help them in the real world?Whether measuring the incomes earned by alumni, their upward economic mobility, or their record in paying off federal student loans, there is no subsequent economic payoff to graduates of institutions that spend large sums of money on athletic programs. And, in all actuality, evidence suggests that graduates of campuses with FBS (‘big-time”) football programs end up earning less than graduates of comparable non-FBS institutions.The statistical analysis provided in this book is derived from a sample of almost 700 four-year institutions between 2004 and 2022. The authors present the information and provide analysis, focusing on five different measures of economic success the alumni (for example, the incomes alumni earn after graduating). The book uses this data to explain that there is either no definitive positive connection—and, in fact, there might be a negative relationship—between intercollegiate athletic programs and the economic success of their alumni.

This book provides a comprehensive overview and economic analysis of US consumer demand for televised football (soccer). Accounting for transnational demand, research is focused on the US consumers demand for the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga, French Ligue 1 and the UEFA Champions League, which represent the most popular and marketable football competitions worldwide, and have recently sealed lucrative media rights contracts in many large markets, including the US. The study also takes account of North American Major League Soccer (MLS) in order to provide a more comprehensive overview of the country's football market and to allow for direct comparisons with the aforementioned European competitions.These findings offer valuable insights for US broadcasters, European league organizers and managers to adjust existing strategies and/or develop new strategies in conquering the US football market.