Guest Editorial

1 The Players’ Labor Market

While the determinants of player salaries, transfer fees, and contract length have been analyzed in a large number of studies already, other important and interesting questions have remained unexplored.

Using a large unbalanced panel with detailed information on football players active in one of the Big 5 European leagues, Sage and Prinz analyze the impact of player agencies on player remuneration. They distinguish between self-representation (the player negotiates his salary himself), representation by a member of his family, and representation by an agency. Their findings indicate that agencies, which typically receive a considerable fraction of their players’ salaries, fail to negotiate more favorable contracts. This suggests that agencies are useless from the players’ perspective and that players should free themselves from “parasites” that simply extract rents belonging to the individual athletes.

Braun and Sonnabend analyze workplace performance effects triggered by team-internal rivalry using data on duos of goalkeepers competing for in-season playing time in the Big 5 European football leagues. They find clear evidence for asymmetric discouragement. While the ex-ante underdog feels demotivated by internal rivalry, no such effect can be found for the ex-ante favorite. Moreover, they find that workplace competition generally works explicitly rather than implicitly in the sense that demonstrated performance outweighs pure skills when it comes to the emergence of peer effects.

Using data from the Women’s National Basketball Association, Berri and Harris examine the impact of giving birth on the athletic performance of players. They specify a productivity model and use a differences-in-means approach and fail to find any statistically significant or economically relevant effect. In the wake of the Gunnarsdottir maternity leave decision against Olympique Lyon – the club initially refused to pay the player during pregnancy but was later sentenced by FIFA to do so – this suggests that leagues should design adequate policies concerning maternity leave. Moreover, this paper contributes to the broader discussion about gender discrimination in the workplace based on perceptions of productivity before and after giving birth.

2 The Market for Head Coaches

Due to the large number of dismissals occurring in each league in each season, the market for head coaches has received particular attention from sports economists. An already large – and still increasing – number of papers have identified the causes and consequences of head coach dismissals.

Brook uses data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States and analyzes the timing of contract modifications instead of dismissals. He finds that head coaches that perform better than expected receive favorable contract modifications earlier. Not surprisingly, he also finds that head coaches whose teams perform worse than expected are fired at higher rates. Head coach ethnicity is statistically significant in the sense that the contracts of Caucasian head coaches are modified sooner than those of non-Caucasian head coaches, suggesting that discrimination may still be an issue.

Foreman, Turick, Williams, and Skinner confirm the latter finding in their analysis of subsequent head coach opportunities for National Football League (NFL) head coaches. They find that Black former NFL head coaches are less likely to secure subsequent NFL head coaching opportunities if their most recent coaching position was in a large media market. However, both Black and non-Black former head coaches who most recently coached in highly segregated metropolitan areas experience higher likelihoods of securing subsequent head coaching opportunities. This segregated market effect is found to be even stronger for Black former head coaches.

3 Fan Behavior

Starke, Vischer, and Dilger use NFL attendance figures over a long period of time to analyze the impact of empty stadiums on home advantage during the Covid 19 pandemic. They find that the advantage of playing on one’s own ground is significantly reduced not only in “ghost matches” when the stadium is completely empty but also in “semi-ghost games” with limited attendance. This effect is mainly due to a better performance of the visiting team’s offence, scoring significantly more points as a result of their improved passing game. Moreover, referee bias in favor of the home team is significantly lower in the absence of spectators.

Scharfenkamp and Wicker analyze the impact of the German Football League’s guidelines that clubs should contribute to a more sustainable environment. Using data from an online survey of the fans of a particular club, the identity of which remains undisclosed they study football fans’ interest in and willingness-to-pay for socially and environmentally sustainable merchandise clothing. Their results show that having environmental concerns, having previously purchased merchandise products, and being aware of sustainable labels significantly positively affects fans’ interest in sustainable clothing. Thus, the probability of reporting a positive willingness-to-pay (>€0) is significantly positively affected by one’s interest in sustainable clothes.

4 The Product Market

Reade and van Ours analyze the impact of a particular anomaly in English 5th division football on match outcomes and attendance in the 1980s. In 1983, the Football Association introduced a two-points-for-a home-win and three-points-for-an-away-win reward system, which was again abolished after three seasons. The anomalous point system was presumably introduced to reduce home advantage but the reasons remain unclear, as are the reasons for abolishing it shortly after its introduction. The authors find that the new point system did not affect match outcomes but did influence match attendance negatively, suggesting that the alternative point system was perceived as unfair to potential ticket buyers some of whom as a response decided to avoid watching the game in person.

Garcia-del-Barrio and Reade argue that professional team sports are part of the entertainment industry where the perceived quality of the matches depends on, first, the degree of competitive balance that determines the uncertainty of the outcome; second, the concentration of talented players in the same team, whose interaction on the field enhances the quality of the show; third, the total combined talent of contestant teams; and, finally, the appeal of rivalries associated with fans’ feelings of empathy and loyalty. Contrary to conventional wisdom arguing that competitive balance should be encouraged to increase uncertainty of outcome to achieve greater interest in sport competitions, the authors argue that some degree of imbalance in the allocation of talent between teams is preferable to broaden the interest of clubs’ fans and, therefore, maximize their revenues and profits.

Summarizing, the nine papers included in this special issue shed light on some important, yet hitherto underexplored aspects of the player and the head coach market, of fan behavior and the product market. We are confident that each contribution will receive the attention that it deserves and encourage readers to provide feedback to the authors.