We analyse whether the creation of the eurozone and the euro crisis had an effect on the sportive performance of professional football teams in European nations. We find a significantly positive sign of membership in the eurozone on UEFA points. However, this positive finding is not robust over...

One of the potential avenues for former professional football players to pursue their career is to become a head coach of a club's first team. An important question is how to best prepare for such a reconversion. This letter is the first in the academic literature quantifying the association...

Billions of euros are invested every year by professional football clubs for the recruitment of players. How do market actors decide prices? This paper presents an econometric model unveiling the key factors coming into play in determining fees on the transfer market for professional football...

One of the potential avenues for former professional football players to pursue their career is to become a head coach of a club’s first team. An important question is how to best prepare for such a reconversion. This letter is the first in the academic literature quantifying the association...

Sports analytics has benefited immensely from the growth and popularity of Machine Learning algorithms. Machine Learning and Data Mining advances have enabled sports analysts to evaluate a player’s performance more effectively. A review of existing literature on player performance evaluation...

I investigate the paradoxes associated with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) point-based ranking of national soccer teams. The ranking has been plagued with paradoxes that incentivize teams to avoid playing friendly matches, i.e., matches that are not part of any...

We provide the first analysis of racial in-group bias in Type-I and Type-II errors. Using player-referee matched data from NBA games we show that there is no overall racial bias or in-group bias in foul calls made by referees. Similarly, there is no racial bias or in-group bias in Type-I errors...

The support of home spectators is one of the contributing factors to the home advantage effect in sports matches. The Covid-19 pandemic led to European soccer matches being played without spectators. We show that betting markets adjusted swiftly to account for a reduced home advantage in both...

The COVID-19 pandemic swept fans out of the stadiums, but matches continued to be played in most major football leagues. We make use of this natural experiment to investigate if home field advantage disappears when the home team is not supported by the fans. Focusing on four top European...

National sports associations in Slovakia are the umbrella organizations for individual types of sports and help achieve the objectives of public policies in the field of sports. In the Slovak Republic, these sports organizations are predominantly funded from public funds. This paper focuses on...

We study how workers in production teams are affected by the temporary absence and replacement of a coworker. When a substitute coworker is absent, the remaining coworkers produce less output per working time. They compensate for this by increasing their working time at the expense of the (less...

Using club-level data on domestic-league and international points from 73 countries, this paper achieves a policy evaluation of country-specific regulations regarding soccer success. The results show that restrictions on foreign direct investment reduce international competitiveness of clubs,...

Two facets of human society are universally present throughout history: a love of sport, and a desire to exercise control over another. Contemporarily, the same is true in America regarding major college football. As the sport has exploded in value over the past three decades, little has changed...

A balanced panel (61 Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) football teams over38 years) is used to estimate four regression models using time series and panelmethods and identify variables that drive per-game season attendance. Variables areeither stationary or co-integrated. Most coefficients...

Scheduling factors such as a visiting team playing a game back-to-back against a rested home team can affect the win probability of the teams for that game and potentially affect teams unevenly throughout the season. This study examines schedule inequity in the National Basketball Association...

Is it lawful for a professional sports league to punish an executive of a team when that executive isn’t employed by the league and, unlike a player, isn’t a member of a union that collectively bargains with the league? The answer to this question has long been presumed as “yes,” despite...

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...

While most of the available literature on competitive balance analyzes its impact on ticket sales and TV audiences, little empirical research is available that analyzes the observable variation in competitive balance across leagues and over time. This paper studies the concentration of player...

In June 2021, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court issued its eagerly anticipated decision in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, ruling for the first time that NCAA rules governing student-athlete eligibility are subject to full scrutiny under federal antitrust law. Although the...

Through which channels, physical or cognitive, can air pollution influence worker performance? This question has not been answered in the literature. Using a unique dataset on the performance of soccer players in China, we investigate the effect of air pollution on different performance...

Under Nigerian Labour Laws, the rights of workers are duly recognised and are duly protected during, and after work. The enactment of these laws, as well as the establishment and jurisdiction of the National Industrial Court (NIC) has been important in the interpretation, recognition and...

Although resource acquisition usually entails resource allocation, as organizations have limited financial resources, the performance implications of resource allocation patterns in the context of resource acquisition have drawn little attention. Drawing on studies on the resource-based view...

This paper investigates the emerging segment of the cryptocurrency market related to football fan tokens (FFT) – digital assets used for engagement with professional football clubs around the world. More specifically, we study investability of FFT from the perspective of risk and performance....

We analyze the natural experiment of ghost games in the 2019/2020 season of the German football Bundesliga and confirm previous studies showing that the home advantage diminishes if the stadium is empty. However, our paper is the first that distinguishes between effort- and skill-based tasks in...

There are noticeable conceptual differences between competing concepts for organizing the highest level of European Football. One major conceptual controversy is concerned with the question whether fans have a stronger preference for (more) games between the top teams over a broad participation...

This paper examines discrimination in the NFL draft. The NFL is a favourable empirical setting to examine the role of skin colour because franchise selectors are required to make rank-order judgements of players based on noisy signals of future productivity. Since wages are tightly related to...

We study how workers in production teams are affected by the temporary absence and replacement of a coworker. When a substitute coworker is absent, the remaining coworkers produce less output per working time. They compensate for this by increasing their working time at the expense of the (less...

In this study we analyze the efficacy of cryptocurrencies as diversifiers in mitigating the dampening effects of COVID-19 on football clubs’ equities performance. Using data for 20 actively traded football clubs’ equities and top 10 cryptocurrencies, we compare the two asset groups both...

Local governments routinely subsidize sports stadiums and arenas using the justification that hosting professional franchises produces economic development and social benefits in the community. The prevalence of venue subsidies generated an extensive and vibrant research literature, which spans...

Fan support has often been considered to be a main driver of the home advantage in sports. Using the natural experiment of ghost games during the COVID-19 pandemic in German professional soccer and a dataset of 6,120 matches ranging over the seasons 2011/2012 to 2020/2021, we test this claim....

In this study we analyze the efficacy of cryptocurrencies as diversifiers in mitigating the dampening effects of COVID-19 on football clubs’ equities performance. Using data for 20 actively traded football clubs’ equities and top 10 cryptocurrencies, we compare the two asset groups both...