Soccer financials
A couple of years ago I had lunch with Roger Noll in London on one of his visits to the LSE and we talked about …
Stefan Szymanski
Real Madrid and Sports Econ 101
So what do professional sports teams sell? Rivalry of course, and to have rivalry you have to have a rival. Real Madrid have broken the …
World Cup Tourist Numbers
The South African Tourism and Migration Report for June 2010 was published today, and facinating reading it makes. Table 3 shows that 721,311 tourists entered …
Economics and tournaments
Last weekend Charles Knoeber, Theofanis Tsoulouhas and Tomislav Vukina of North Carolina State organized an excellent conference on the economics of tournaments and contests. The …
South African World Cup tourist arrivals part 2
The South African statistical service fooled me into thinking the July figures would appear in another month, when in fact they published them today, having …
A historic day for football
Association football, that is. FIFA, the world governing body, has announced that it has reached agreement with FIFPro, the international players’ union, over a range …
Globalization and sporting nationalism
Despite being much over-hyped, globalization is a genuine phenomenon in sports. Absent barriers (legal, economic or cultural) to mobility, talent will migrate to where it …
For heaven’s sake, not cricket again!
Sorry, but this is all just too exciting to resist. Trying to explain to non-cricket fans why this England-Australia series is so exciting is pretty …
The world’s greatest cricketer retires
The Australian spin bowler Shane Warne announced his retirement from international cricket yesterday. His 699 wickets (batsmen retired) in test matches (5 day games) is …
About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters
Tuesday’s crushing defeat of England by Australia demonstrated exactly why cricket fans love the game and the rest of the world is bemused. The game …