This paper develops a contest model of a professional sports league in which clubs maximize a weighted sum of profits and wins (utility maximization). The model analyzes how more win-orientated behavior of certain clubs affects talent investments, competitive balance and club profits. Moreover,...

This paper outlines how the theory of contests is applied to professional team sports leagues. In the first part, we present the traditional Tullock contest and explain some basic properties of the equilibrium. We will then extend this static contest to a two-period model in order to analyze...

Professional sports leagues have witnessed the appearance of so-called "sugar daddies" - people who invest enormous amounts of money into clubs and become their owners. This paper presents a contest model of a professional sports league that incorporates this phenomenon. We analyze how the...

In the recent years, many clubs in the biggest European soccer leagues have run into debts. The sports economic literature provides several explanation for this development, e.g., the league structure (open versus closed league), club constitutions, ruinous rat races between clubs. While the...