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...

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...

Match-day revenue is still an important source of income for many professional sports clubs. This paper studies the determinants of ticket pricing in professional sports and examines whether stadium visitors pay a premium for teams’ sporting success and any excesses in the players’ labour...

This paper provides a contest model of a professional team sports league and analyzes the impact of a restriction on foreign players. It shows that a league with binding restrictions on foreign talent for all clubs is more balanced than a league without binding restrictions on foreign talent....

Choosing the legal structure of a sports institution is one of the key decisions that sports managers must make, in part because the legal structure influences the revenue composition of sports institutions. Based on platform theory and property rights theory, this paper suggests that members...