The Sports Economist

• Texas tends to overwork its fears of private school dominance. The size of the state and the tradition with many of its public high schools in athletics would tend to offset private school advantages that occurred in TN, where Brentwood Academy has dominated. Public schools such as Southlake Carroll have become, in effect, the equivalent of a Brentwood Academy through money and self-selection. I suspect that occurs elsewhere.
• I'm a fence-sitter when it comes to benefit-cost analysis of some of the specific restraints. The restraint on summer camp participation struck me as over-the-top back in the 1970s, but seeing how many coaches essentially demand their players to attend individual and team camps over the years troubles me also.
  
• The institutional framework in the U.S. has not been well-suited to handle the athletic-education mix -- that seems an understatement. It is very similar to the problems at the collegiate level. I would admit now (not then), high school football was way too important in my hometown. It was nearly semi-professional. We had a head coach and 9 positional coaches. Our head coach/AD made as much as anybody in the school district. These problems have been compounded over the years with more growth in interest in athletics and earlier monitoring and development of top caliber young athletes who become like rock stars in high school. The English soccer academy system seems a good way to mix schooling with development of very promising athletes. At least in basketball, there are a few rough equivalents of the soccer academies. In football, that really does not exist.
• The lack of academy system or developmental minor league systems in sports such as basketball seem, to me, to have a long-run detrimental effect on young athletes. Instead of working hard the a development pipeline in relative obscurity against genuine peers, top high school athletes in the U.S. frequently vault to superstar status with little of the effort and maturation inherent in a longer pipeline.
  

In Rehoboth, Mass., Joyce Amaral collected 1,800 golf balls from her property abutting Middlebrook Country Club, then lugged them into court when she sued the club. Ms. Amaral’s house was hit so regularly, her landscapers wore hard hats. Balls set off the burglar alarm and dented her car.

Although the club existed decades before the house was built, a court ruled that the balls — and the golfers looking for them — were a trespass. The parties settled this month, with the club agreeing to shorten the No. 9 hole, which should keep the Amaral property out of the line of fire.

But Pete Cuppels, the club’s owner, said the settlement would probably put his low-cost nine-hole course out of business.

"I’ve already had to take $50,000 from my retirement account to pay for legal fees, both the plaintiff’s and mine," Mr. Cuppels, 68, said. "We modified the hole before the settlement, and we’ve already seen a big drop in return business. I feel worse that my name is on a ruling that could be like the Roe v. Wade of golf law. If the precedent is that golf course owners are responsible for every crooked shot hit by a novice or a good golfer, we’re all in trouble."

England's successful march to the semi-finals of the European Under-21 championship in Holland means a British side is now entitled to one of the four places guaranteed by Uefa for European teams at the 2008 Olympics.

But because of a split between England and Northern Ireland and the rest of the British nations over the issue of an Olympic football team, the FA are to turn down the chance to enter a team in the under-23 tournament. It is understood that back in February they decided not to take up their right to enter the Beijing Games.

...Although England and Northern Ireland support the idea of fielding a British team in the Games, Scotland and Wales are opposed. They fear it would undermine the British nations' right to exist as four associations recognised by Fifa, world football's governing body.

"We take risks; we want to be competitive," said Jim Delany, the Big Ten commissioner. "It’s in the nature of our sports and our institutions."

...By carving enough rights to create the Big Ten Network out of a new 10-year, $100 million contract with ESPN and ABC, Delany has bucked the trend to be satisfied only with rights fees from networks and has chosen to extend the conference’s brand, expand the reach of its recruiting and build a valuable asset.

The channel, which Fox Cable Networks will run and own 49 percent of, will carry 35 football games, 105 men’s and 55 women’s basketball games, archived games dating from 1960, Olympic sports (the rights to some of which are still owned by CSTV through the 2007-8 season) and 660 hours a year of academic programming.

The dispute over the Big Ten Network, which is to go on the air in August, is typical of the tensions between cable operators and sports networks. The cable operators prefer not to add sports channels, whose costs of acquiring the rights to carry teams are inflated by high player salaries.

The Big Ten Network will be paying the conference a $50 million annual rights fee — not much less than what SNY is paying the Mets or YES is paying the Yankees.

Comcast discussed becoming the Big Ten’s partner in the network, before Fox entered, but the talks foundered over the cable operator’s view of a more limited, less expensive channel than the conference envisioned.

They (UEFA et al) want sport to be given a "specificity", or special exemption from EU rules. It has such a status under an EU treaty signed in Nice in 2000, but this was not made legally binding.

The latest draft, however, does not do that.

"The only solution is the one in the Nice declaration. This paper as it stands is a Molotov cocktail waiting to explode, created by too many chefs in the kitchen," FIBA President George Vassilakopoulos told Reuters.

The key points of dispute involve TV rights and rules for soccer and other sports that require a quota of local, or "homegrown", players.

Some commissioners such as EU competition chief Neelie Kroes want sports disputes to be decided purely on economic, not social, grounds -- like any other business.
"We recognise that sport is special ... but no one can seriously argue that sports bodies should have an exemption from the competition rules for their commercial behaviour," a spokesman for Kroes said.

Premier League clubs have spent over 15% of revenue generated since 1992/93 on improving their facilities whereas Football League clubs have spent over 12%. These are impressive amounts and again illustrate the fact that stadium investment, and the on-going financial benefits it can deliver, is a significant element of a successful football business strategy.

Says Maltbie, "We all have a filter that keeps us from cussing in front of our moms or the minister — not that Johnny would do that — but it's a filter he doesn't possess. If it's in his head, it's going to come out of his mouth." Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, says Miller is just like television's other JMs, John McEnroe and Joe Morgan. None of them has a governor," "You're getting them just the way they are."

Miller's colleagues might worry if they saw him pulling back on his preparation, but he still goes out early on broadcast days to take copious notes on the course setup. Before today's show, for instance, he drove out to the first green to see if an invisible pitch mark was really responsible for the four-foot putt Tiger Woods missed yesterday on the first playoff hole of his loss to Nick O'Hern.

• Providing arms-length assessments drawn from insight and experience;
  
• Willingness to collect, analyze, and be influenced by data;
• Asking good good questions (See Johnny Miller -- Economist).

I co-majored in economics in college. A lot of good that does me now. I can't figure out what's going on in pro sports.

Let's start with television. In case you haven't heard, the ratings are down for the Stanley Cup Finals, the NBA Finals and the Belmont. Everywhere you turn, fewer people are watching than before. Yet salaries, ticket prices, and the cost of hot dogs continue to go up. Does that make any sense?

There's 35 years of literature on what determines revenue and attendance of sports teams, and you can never find that it's the effect of one sport on another," said Roger Noll, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford. "The only thing that affects ticket sales and local revenue of a sports team other than its own quality is whether there's another team in the same sport within 15 miles. The Sharks might lose a couple of suite sales, but they don't really need to worry.

Surveys, Noll said, show that most fans have a favorite sport - and very few are intensive consumers for teams in other sports. "Season-ticket holders and people who buy tickets for multiple games typically don't have multiple sports they're interested in," Noll said.

"If the A's and 49ers are both within 15 miles of HP Pavilion," he predicted, "there will be some people who substitute for the Sharks. But it's going to be a small percentage, single-digit."

Bonds's approach to his coming batting record has tied baseball fans and writers in knots. Ask most baseball fans whether they think he should be elected to the Hall of Fame, and get ready for a lot of passion, a whole lot less reason. I teach a course on sports history and try to help my students to understand this controversy in context — of baseball history and of race.

Bud Selig, the baseball commissioner, has not figured out how or whether Major League Baseball will even mark Bonds's record-setting homer. Aaron (who faced horrifying racial hatred himself as he got close to Ruth's sacred 714 mark) has decided not to attend games in which Bonds could break his record. The longtime sportswriter and NPR commentator Frank Deford proposed ignoring the record and booing Bonds out of the game last year, when two San Francisco Chronicle investigative reporters alleged that Bonds had used steroids. This year Deford suggested his own "Emily Post solution" to the elephant in the room: Ignore the event by throwing a party to celebrate anything and everything else. The only stadium where Bonds doesn't get booed every time he walks to the plate is his home park in San Francisco.

It turns out, however, that all fans are not equal on the subject of Bonds. Sixty years after Jackie Robinson's Dodgers debut, black and white fans live in separate but unequal lands. Consider the results of a recent ESPN/ABC News poll indicating black fans are two-and-a-half times more likely than white fans (74 percent to 29 percent) to want Bonds to break Aaron's record; and three times as many white as black fans (60 percent to 18 percent) want Bonds to fall short. Looked at another way, three-quarters of black fans want Bonds to break the record, while three-fifths of white fans want him to fail.

How are we supposed to think about that phenomenon, which presents us with a true teaching moment in the history of sports and race? Let's look at the responses, and then at the history.

First, many white folks say race has nothing to do with how they look at a player. In the case of Bonds, his personal surliness makes it easier to shrug him off with a "Bonds is an asshole." (It's true — try Googling the phrase.) Among white fans, 76 percent think Bonds knowingly used steroids. It's all about him, nothing about the speaker.

Second, many black folks are reluctant to believe that Bonds knowingly used steroids. African-American fans, in fact, divide pretty evenly over whether they think Bonds used the juice: 37 percent to 36 percent, with 26 percent having no opinion. Could it be that they are responding to the willingness of the white establishment to believe that a haughty, self-absorbed black man took steroids? Or is it simply that African-Americans root for their own, cutting black ballplayers a little more slack than white people do?

No, I think the answer lies deeper in the tangled, often contradictory history of African-Americans in professional sports.

So as you look around the NFL for the franchise that’s most unhappy with its stadium deal, the Vikings quickly jump to the top of the list. Their lease at the Metrodome runs through 2011, but as any contract lawyer will tell you, everything’s negotiable. So get used to the sound of “the Los Angeles Vikings.” It only makes sense.

Pro football is dead in L.A. because the owners have put it on the back burner for years, more interested in using the threat of it to extorttaxpayer money from cities and playing potential stadium owners and sites against each other. A rise in TV ratings this year, and the fact that NFL games get a decent share in L.A. even without a local team, have also reduced the urgency level.

Despite the fact that a team in Los Angeles would help the NFL in broadcast negotiations, the city also has some value to the league without a team. Every time a football team is unhappy in its current city, it gets to threaten to move to Los Angeles in an effort to get a better stadium deal and more tax breaks. (The fact that Mayor Hahn appears uninterested in such sweetheart deals doesn't seem to have diminished the effectiveness of a general threat to decamp to L.A.) San Diego, Indianapolis, Minnesota, and New Orleans have all pulled this stunt recently. So letting Los Angeles go without football has allowed the NFL to extort more money from taxpayers across the country.

Labels: stadium subsidies, Vikings

The Charlotte Coliseum, the site of 19 years of sporting excellence, has been imploded. This arena was opened in 1988 and was built with 100% of public funds.

In some Utopian sports society, where the separation of sports and state are clear, would the Coliseum have been torn down at 19 years of age and would it have been built so big in the first place?

This seems to be one of the things Milton Friedman had in mind when he warned us about spending other people's money on other people.

*Thanks to commenter Frank for noting that I had written the arena had too many luxury boxes when I originally wrote the post

Labels: NBA, stadium subsidies, stadiums

The seeds of the current controversy were first sewn in the qualifiers for the 1994 World Cup.

At that point South America's nations were still divided into separate groups, and as ill fortune would have it, Brazil were placed in the same group as Bolivia and Ecuador.

Brazilian teams have developed a phobia about playing at altitude, and it was alleged at the time that Brazil put pressure on both opponents to switch their matches to venues at sea level.

They did this successfully in the case of Ecuador, unsuccessfully in the case of Bolivia, where, at La Paz, Brazil suffered their first ever defeat in World Cup qualification.

Despite that reverse Brazil went on to qualify for USA 94, and win it too. As holders they were automatically through to France 98.

They were back in the qualifiers for the 2002 World Cup, by which time South America had adopted the current marathon format, with all 10 nations playing each other home and away.

The allegations of manipulation in 1993 had left a bad taste, so in order to ensure the integrity of the qualifying campaign countries were limited to one designated city where they would stage all their home games.

This was specifically designed to contain the problem of altitude. If one country had to go up to La Paz, everyone had to. There could be no external pressure.

Brazil, on account of its size, was given the right to have two home cities.

They chose Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the traditional centres, and quickly found the fans to be very demanding.

The Maracana and Morumbi stadiums echoed with boos, the players' morale was in tatters and World Cup qualification was in real doubt.

Brazil pulled a fast one. Using the excuse of an energy crisis affecting the south east of the country, they moved their final home games to other venues - smaller cities where the supporters were more tolerant.

It broke the rules but they got away with it and three wins got them safely over the finish line.

But now they are paying the price. They themselves took away the plank that had been put in place to contain the problem of altitude.

If they could pick and choose their venues, so could the others. The one designated city was dead.

Peru decided to pull a fast one of their own. For the next campaign they were planning to take their matches against Brazil and other altitude haters high up the Andes to Cuzco.

• Athletic integration. Broyles was the first to play African-American football players, both at Missouri (in 1957) and at Arkansas (in 1970).
• Conference expansion and realignment. Broyles masterminded the Razorbacks' prescient jump from a crumbling Southwest Conference to the superpower Southeastern Conference.
• The explosion of revenues and expenditures as athletic departments became their own fiefdoms. Arkansas' athletic budget was $900,000 when Broyles took over and today it is $44 million.
• The rise of the superstar coach. Some huge names in college sports have called Broyles boss: Lou Holtz, Nolan Richardson, Eddie Sutton, Ken Hatfield, Danny Ford among them. But none of them was as big as the Head Hog.
• The nationwide facilities arms race. Arkansas is among the national leaders in that category, as Broyles himself made an impressive transition from coach to savvy businessman and uncanny fund-raiser.

• Poor performance in the sports that matter most to boosters as Broyles grew older -- only 1 bowl win over the last 20 years and few big bowl appearance; only 1 NCAA tourney win in the last 10 years.
• Squabbles with Lou Holtz and Eddie Sutton that lead to their departures -- in Sutton's case stating that he would "crawl to Lexington," a statement made to dis Broyles.
• An inability to recruit proven coaches over the last 20 years (Richardson was his last notable hire, but as it turned out, also sowed the seeds of the program's downfall).