The transfer system imposed by the football governing bodies on employment relations made sure that a player could not leave his current club and sign with another club without the current club's explicit consent. The 1995 Bosman judgement of the European Court of Justice declaring football...

Historically, European team sports leagues were run by their respective national and international associations and were legally independent from the professional clubs playing in these leagues. Recently, European leagues have adopted an organizational form similar to their North American...

The release of players from a club to the national team often leads to a conflict concerning the duration of the players' stay with the national team. Based on a theoretical bargaining model, we examine whether intervention in this conflict by a governing body is desirable. We show that...

This paper develops a model of a professional sports league with network externalities by integrating the theory of two-sided markets into a contest model. In professional team sports, the competition of the clubs functions as a platform that enables sponsors to interact with fans. In these...

This paper outlines and compares the organizational structure of major sports leagues, explores the reasoning behind their formation, and derives implications for salary caps in European football. To understand why sports leagues have developed a specific organizational structure, one must take...

This paper analyzes the effects of a percentage-of-revenue salary cap in a team sports league with win-maximizing clubs and flexible talent supply. It shows that a percentage-of-revenue cap produces a more balanced league and decreases aggregate salary payments. Taking into account the...

This paper provides a theoretical model of a team sports league based on contest theory and studies the welfare effect of gate revenue-sharing. It derives two counter-intuitive results. First, it challenges the "invariance proposition" by showing that revenue-sharing reduces competitive balance...

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....

In the December 2002 issue of the American Economic Review, Mark Duggan and Steven D. Levitt published an article on corruption in professional sumo. In the present paper, we update Duggan and Levitt's study to take into account changes since January 2000. We find strong statistical evidence...

Many major sports leagues are characterized by a combination of cross-subsidization mechanisms like revenue-sharing arrangements and payroll restrictions. Up to now, the effects of these policy tools have only been analyzed separately. This article provides a theoretical model of a team sports...