New UEFA Proposals for Interference in Soccer

UEFA has long been proposing measured clearly aimed at curbing the recent European prominence of English soccer clubs. Proposals limiting the number of overseas players and limiting foreign ownership have been mooted in the past, although thankfully both are unworkable given EU common market regulations. The latest proposal is that soccer clubs should not be allowed to be the beneficiaries of generous benefactors such as Roman Abramovich, Jack Walker or the Middle Eastern owners of Manchester City.

Michel Platini has generally been the source of these measures, and appears to be fairly well known for his anti-English sentiment – so much so that he felt obliged to defend himself recently on this count.

Platini notes that “It’s mainly the owners that asked us to do something – Roman Abramovich, (AC Milan’s) Silvio Berlusconi, (Inter Milan’s) Massimo Moratti. They do not want to fork out from their pockets any more.” Manchester United apparently also welcome the idea, although where they’d hide that £500m debt I’m not entirely sure. Of course the big teams welcome it – it would grant them protection from the likes of Manchester City and other upstarts threatening the established order. Italian clubs are bound to be onside given the precarious nature of their finances, and their poor performance in Europe in the last decade relative to their glorious 1990s.

Platini’s suggestion is that clubs can get outside funding to buy players, but that any debt must be repaid within two years. Otherwise clubs must buy players from revenues generated. Which of course means that clubs generating great revenues (those already successful) will continue to attract the best players, and the uncompetitive nature of European soccer leagues will persist.

My two-penneth on the matter is that squad sizes (rosters) should be limited in order to foster competition. Of course this introduces distortion into the market, like imposing some restriction on the inventory companies can hold, but it seems more likely to address the current dominance of top clubs in European soccer leagues.

UEFA Concerned with Club Debt

Today was the draw for the UEFA Champions League.  As a side note, I would like to say I am very pleased with Arsenal’s draw.

However, a more intriguing piece of news from the day is that UEFA is threatening to kick teams which have debts, out of the Champions League competition.  President Michel Platini has said new financial rules will be in place by 2012.  From his comments, it seems that these rules will require that clubs will be required to spend only as much as they make.  After a summer of record transfer fee’s paid out by Real Madrid, it seems UEFA is fighting back against these rising costs by taking actions which will threaten one of the main sources of revenue for the more powerful clubs in Europe.  From a variety of commentaries, it seems Platini doesn’t like the shopping sprees some times have been going on, and there is hint Platini wishes to see more “fair play” on and off the pitch in European Football.  Sounds to me, like Platini is a fan of competitive balance.

If the rule were to come into affect today, several teams would be in trouble of being removed from Champions League, including Manchester United (debt of about $1 billion), Liverpool (debt of about $400 million), and possibly even Real Madrid (supposedly up to $800 million after their summer shopping).  Of course Platini said the penalty for being in debt will range from being “fined” to “kicked out” of Champions League.  It will be interesting to see if, when the rule comes into affect, if UEFA will really have the bravado to try and throw out some of the biggest names in professional sports from their competition.

A final note, which struck me as ironic, is some of Platini’s rationale for the new rules.  He is quoted in this article as saying that Chelsea Owner Roman Abramovich approached him saying that things had gone too far, and does not want to “fork out anymore” cash for players.  This from a man who paid £30 million for Shevchenko (a record transfer fee for British clubs at the time) a few years ago, has spent around 700 million Euro’s of his own money on the club (Chelsea spent £400 million in transfer fee’s since his arrival), a large chunk of which went to player transfer fee’s, and is even claimed to be the force which has caused the increases of spending in the European transfer market.  All of this past history aside, Chelsea has been working towards becoming more financially stable.

Maybe it is a sign of how bad things have gone, when the Oil Baron’s in a league start complaining about how much they have to spend.

Corruption, Snooker and Betfair

The BBC reports that two snooker players, Stephen Maguire and Jamie Burnett, were arrested as part of an investigation into corruption in a snooker match between them. They were both later released without charge, but it appears action is hotting up in the investigation into the match between the two, which ended 9-3 to Maguire back in December 2008.

In the match, Burnett missed a simple black to make the score 8-4 in the final frame of the match, leaving Maguire to pot the ball and win 9-3. Betfair took vast amounts of bets on a 9-3 scoreline, with next to nothing on a 9-2 or 9-4 score, prompting suspicion.

As has probably been mentioned on this blog, snooker is a sport more susceptible to corruption, like tennis, than football, soccer or other team sport, because the principal seeking to influence outcomes only need access one or at most two agents, so to speak. For a player low down in the rankings, the carrot of a large bribe to throw a match is likely to prove particularly tempting. We shall have to wait and see how the trial develops…

Phoenix Coyotes Update

The ownership issue is turning into a soap opera.  I’m sure that hockey fans in Phoenix (assuming they exist) are hoping that Pam will wake up soon and realize this has all been a bad dream.

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version: Jerry Reinsdorf and his low-ball $148 million offer – OUT.  I saw that coming. Jim Balsillie, his $212.5 million offer, and a line of moving vans with “Hamilton, ON” programmed into the GPS – still “untrustworthy” according to the NHL Board of Governors. Appearing as a special guest star after being away at boarding school for an extended period – Ice Edge Holdings, a group headed by Anthony LeBlanc, who used to work for Balsillie at Research in Motion (see I told you this is now a soap opera). Ice Edge Holdings dug around behind the cushions on the couch and in the ash tray of the car and scraped together “about $150 million” for the team.  The exact value of the offer is vague in the news report.  They also mowed Wayne Gretzky’s yard and promised to take out the trash for the next 50 years, and are reportedly nice to small children and help old ladies cross the street. You know, the things that count with the NHL Board of Governors.  Also appearing in an uncredited cameo – the NHL who also put in a bid for the Coyotes.  The value of the NHL’s bid is not known at this time.

Last time I checked, $150 million < $212.5 million.  Again, this comes down to the financial interests of the creditors who are owed money by Jerry Moyes vs. the NHL Board of Governors who want to maintain the NHL’s existing territorial agreement.  It will be decided by a bankruptcy court judge (Redfield T. Baum – a soap opera name if I have ever heard one). Will he favor the creditors or the league? It’s a cliff hanger! The next episode hearing, will take place place September 2nd. Stay Tuned!

“Comments” in Journals

I came across a hilarious and terrifying description of the experiences of a physicist attempting to respond to a published paper that refuted some of his research.  This paper, “How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 123 easy steps” reveals quite a bit about the publication process.  I recommend that you read the entire harrowing piece if you are interested in learning something interesting about the academic publication process.

I have been through the “comment” process as a participant a three times in economics journals.  I never ran into this sort of Kafka-esque situation, but I am not at all surprised that this sort of thing goes on, and believe all of it.  Comments are an important part of the publication process.  They provide an additional layer of peer review in the publication process, and help ensure that scientific inquiry advances in the right direction.  The IJSF hasn’t yet published a “comment” on a published paper, but I’m sure that day will come.  I certainly hope we handle the situation better than the editors described in “How to Publish …”.

The suggested “fixes” to the publication process at the end of the paper are a mix of interesting, often-heard, and completely off the mark suggestions.  Clearly, the editor who published a paper should not handle a comment on that paper because of the potential conflict of interest.  Economists have been howling for an archival process for data used in empirical research for years, to mixed success.  However, I take issue with the final suggested remedy

Finally, lets face it: most journal editors are simply too arrogant and have lost sight of the goal, which, it appears I need to remind them of here, is to publish only truth.  Perhaps they could be required to take a course or two in humility.

I am a journal editor, both for the IJSF and Contemporary Economic Policy.  I know several other journal editors in economics, finance and sport management.  I have dealt with many others in my career.  I have not found them to be arrogant.  The journal editors I know are mostly hard working and well-meaning.  They have a difficult job, because they make most of the authors they deal with unhappy.  I certainly try to deal with authors and referees in a respectful manner.  Some tension is unavoidable, because being an editor entails rejecting papers, a painful process.  Of course, Professor Trebino was dragged through a horrible process.  The whole Catch-22 “one page limit” on his comment is painful to read, even though he manages to make light of it.  I can’t say that I would have any less scathing suggestions if I had to go through what he did.

(Hat tip to the always interesting Craig Newmark).

Public Support for a New Arena in Edmonton

My local NHL team, the Edmonton Oilers, play in the second oldest arena in the NHL, Rexall Place.  For the past several years, the team and the mayor have been engaged in an elaborate dance around the issue of a new arena for the Oilers.  The big questions are where will it be located and who will pay.  Darryl Katz, the owner of the Oilers, said long ago that he would put up $100 million for the new arena and has never budged from this position.  Of course $100 million doesn’t buy much of an arena these days, so someone else will have to pay for the rest.

Hmm, lets see, where do wealthy sports team owners in North America go when they need a few hundred million dollars for a new facility?  The bond market?  Nah, that’s crazy talk.  Wait, I’ve got it: get the tax payers to build you a new arena!  (Stop me if you have heard this story before.)

The results of a survey announced last week throws a big bucket of cold water on that idea.  The survey of Edmontonians, carried out by polling firm Ipsos Reid, finds that 76% of Edmontonians “strongly” or “somewhat strongly” disagree with the statement “The City should provide taxpayers money for a new Hockey Arena.”  That’s a sizable majority, and the poll results present a problem for those who want the new arena to be built with public funds.

Of course this won’t be the end of the subsidy bid – just ask taxpayers in Pittsburgh who voted against subsidies for new football and baseball facilities in 1997 only to see them built anyway.

(Hat tip to Andy Grabia at The Battle of Alberta.)

IJSF added to SCOPUS

Good news on the citation front:  We have just learned that the IJSF will be included in the SCOPUS citation database.  We have been a part of the Web of Science/Social Science Citation Index for several years, which also means that the IJSF is ranked in the Journal Citation Reports.

Although this is big news, many of you loyal IJSF blog readers are probably thinking “so what?”  Here’s the scoop.  One of the main tools used by administrators in higher education for evaluating the quality of scholarship these days is citations.  It’s not enough to publish papers in peer-reviewed journals like the IJSF. Researchers are expected to publish papers that are cited by other researchers.  Citations are interpreted as a better measure of the quality of scholarship than raw publication counts because citations indicate that some other scholar skimmed or read the paper, and found what was in the paper useful enough to include in the citations of another paper that was good enough to get published.

In the old days, when academics were academics and reference librarians were scared s*%@less, citation counts were difficult to calculate.  There were print publications — in economics it was the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) — that occupied scores of linear feet of shelf space in libraries. The SSCI was notoriously difficult to use, because it used cryptic abbreviations for journals and consisted entirely of  hundreds of thousands of pages that contained information like this:

SCHWARTZ RM
74 J EXP PSYCHOL      102     517
ASUNCION AG        J EXP S PSY         31   437   95
75 PROGR BEHAVIOR THERA
FOKIAS D               CLIN PSYCH        15   437   95
76 J CONSULT CLIN PSYCH 44    910
MALLE BF               J PER SOC            68   470   95
MARX EM               EUR R AP PS        44   271   95
85 READ TEACH       39     198
PALINCSA.AS       SCH PSYCH R     24    331   95
86 ADV COGNITIVE BEHAVI      5      1
BRUCH MA            COGN THER R    19      91    95
“                          J PERSONAL      63      47    95
HOPE DA                BEHAV RES T     33    637    95
89 FAM PLANN PERSPECT      21      170
CURRIE J                AM ECON REV   85    106   95
LEWIT EM              FUT CHILD            5      35   95
MEHLMANN MJ   AM J HU GEN      55  1054   94
92 MANAGEING MULTICULTUR
TAIBI AD               DUKE LAW J      44     928  95   R

I found that material on a page at the Western Washington University library explaining how to use the SSCI. That information is now about as useful as knowing how to operate a buggy whip.  As you can see, that’s an Incredibly User Friendly Interface ™.  The entry summarizes the citations for papers published by  someone named R.M. Schwartz.  The text in bold indicate the publications.  The first line, “74 J EXP PSYCHOL      102     517″ is for a paper that was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (I am guessing – as I mentioned the SSCI journal acronyms were obscure) in 1974.  In volume 102, on page 517.  The next line “ASUNCION AG  J EXP S PSY  31   437   95″ is a citation.  Someone named  A.G. Asuncion cited Schwartz’s 1974 Journal of Experimental Psychology paper in another journal (J EXP S PSY, whatever the heck that is) in 1995.  Note that all of the citations are from 1994 or 1995.  That’s because there was a SSCI volume published every year.  So to get a citation count for Professor RM Schwartz, you had to thumb through the SSCI volume for every year.

As an aside, dusting off my rusty SSCI reading skills, I can tell you that R.M. Schwartz was writing some good papers. Some of them were still being cited regularly 20 years after publication, and one of his papers was cited in the American Economic Review ( CURRIE J   AM ECON REV   85    106   95) a top journal in another discipline.  Not too shabby.  As you can easily see, getting citation counts was not easy in the Old Days. It involved sitting in the library for hours, doing significant damage to your eyesight (the SSCI was set in a punishingly tiny agate typeface), counting lines in the SSCI.  And then you walked home two hours through a blizzard uphill all the way with only tattered rags on your feet.  We had it tough in those days.

In these modern times, we have Them Internets ™ to make citation counting easy.  That’s where SCOPUS and Web of Science (which is the web-based version of the SSCI) come in.  If your university has a subscription to one of these services, you can easily get the citation count for any paper written by any author in a journal that is included in these databases.  You can also get a citation count through Google Scholar for free, but Google Scholar citation counts include a lot of citations from outlets other than peer reviewed academic journals.

My method of evaluating the quality of a paper is to read it and decide for myself how good the paper is.  But I’m old fashioned, and my method wouldn’t work well if I had to evaluate a paper on, say, quantum mechanics.

This process also extends to the evaluation of scholarly journals.  That’s where the Journal Citation Reports come into the picture.  Academic journals are now evaluated and ranked based on where, when, and how often papers published in each journal are cited.  The JCRs rank journals based on a number of citation metrics that I don’t fully understand.  It doesn’t matter that the users of these rankings don’t understand how they are constructed.   The user just glances at the rankings to see where Journal X stands.  Not the best system, but that’s the way the research biz works.

The bottom line: getting the IJSF in SCOPUS and Web of Science is a good thing because it makes it easier to track citations of papers published in the journal.  If you publish a paper in the IJSF, or a paper published in the IJSF cites a paper you published, then those things get fed into the gaping maw of the academic-industrial complex, and will eventually be spit out in the form of citation counts or journal rankings.

Then, if you are lucky, some associate vice dean for evaluation and punishment will glance at your citation count for five seconds, evaluate your work based on that single number, and decide to give you a merit pay increase that will be almost enough, after taxes, to purchase a 9″ cheese pizza (if you have a coupon).  Sorry – my cynicism is sometimes difficult to rein in.

Limiting Foreigners in Sports Leagues

The blog Economic Logic has a post on some new research from sports leagues on the prevalence of foreign players. It’s based on new research from Markus Lang, Alexander Rathke and Marco Runkel on the potential benefits of restricting foreign players in leagues.

The suggestion is that leagues with foreigner restrictions are more balanced competitively, domestic player wages are higher and club profits rise too. I can certainly believe much of this, and in the case of the English Premier League, some of it sounds desirable – Man United’s dominance in recent years means I lose interest.

But would such a restriction really be enough? My micro theory isn’t my strongest suit, but it seems that the model in the paper doesn’t allow for outside injections of cash into clubs, such as Roman Abramovich’s money at Chelsea, or the Abu Dhabi United Group and Manchester City. Such developments will likely always, when the talent pool isn’t fixed by roster size (something referred to in the paper), lead to competitive imbalance as the teams with outside injections can buy up the best of the available player talent, domestic or foreign, and dominate a league.

I personally am not in favour of restricting foreign players, particularly in the Premiership, as I believe it will do little to help develop domestic players (all economists know about the virtues of protectionism), and I don’t think it will help create a more balanced contest because of other issues such as the absence of squad size limits.

IJSF Author Q&A: Phil Miller

Researchers trace the advance of a line of research through citation trails, a progression of published articles through time.  But each published article is like an iceberg: it’s just the visible tip of the research project, and most of the big, important stuff lies below, unobservable.  The IJSF blog is a useful way to expose some more of the iceberg, and can help us learn more about the space in between published papers, where the interesting part of the research process takes place.

Phil Miller is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Minnesota State University, Mankato.  His research focuses on labor economics in sport, where he has published extensively on arbitration in sport, and on the economic  impact of sport.  He blogs at Market Power and The Sports Economist.  His paper “Facility Age and Ownership in Major American Team Sports Leagues: The Effect on Team Franchise Values” was published in IJSF4.3.

1. Where did you get the idea for this paper?

I had a paper published in the Journal of Sports Economics (in 2007) in which I examined the determinants of MLB franchise values published annually by Forbes.  One of the items I looked at was the effect of public ownership of playing facilities on team franchise values.  I found that MLB franchises that owned their playing facilities had, on average, higher estimated values than teams that did not own their facilities.  The paper that appears in the current IJSF extends my work in the 2007 JSE paper to the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL.

2. What were some of the challenges that you faced when working on this research?

A lack of time, the always-scarce productive resource, was the main thing that I had to deal with.  Fortunately, my college (the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Minnesota State University, Mankato) has a research reassignment program that gives faculty a one-class teaching load reduction in exchange for the completion of a research project.  That reassignment gave me the time to work on this project.

3. How does this paper fit in your research agenda?

It fits into my agenda in a couple of ways.  First, almost all of my previous publications had something to do with MLB and I wanted to branch out into studying other sports leagues.  Second, one of my ongoing interests is the relation between government and sports.  The effect of facility ownership on franchise values is a new angle of this branch of research that I wanted to keep exploring.

4. Describe a future research project that you would like to see that builds on your paper.

Well, any future project would certainly have to prominently cite my work, positively so of course.  OK., I’m kidding there.  But Forbes franchise value estimates are widely-reported figures that aren’t well understood by those outside of those who create them (i.e. the folks at Forbes).  I would be interested in papers that further explore the determinants of these values.  For instance, some have argued that these franchise value estimates are simple multiples of revenues.   Is this the case?

Player Power

Alan Hansen, ex-Liverpool soccer player and current BBC pundit expresses his interpretation on a situation currently affecting Everton here.

Manchester City, North-West rivals of Everton and recent beneficiaries of Middle-East wealth beyond imagination, have publicly pursued Everton defender Joleon Lescott. Lescott has been settled at Everton, a good solid team who perform just behind the ‘big four’ in English soccer, and compete in Europe in the coming season.

Yet Manchester City, who won’t be competing in Europe this season, are proving to be too strong an attracting force for Lescott. Rumours are that City will double Lescott’s salary, and a player at the age of 27 (footballers tend to last until their early to mid-30s) would surely jump at an opportunity at this stage of his career to double his money.

Hansen also suggests that the current impasse (Everton unwilling to sell, Lescott contracted) is indicative of the current state of player power in the English Premiership. Twenty years ago a player would have had little say in the matter and would have had to carry on playing at Everton – power was with the clubs. Now, Lescott supposedly has much more power.

The essential difference is that now, once Lescott’s contract is up, he can leave Everton without Everton receiving a fee, whereas in the past, any club seeking to buy Lescott even after his contract had expired would have to pay Everton a fee. Which is what makes Everton’s situation weaker since they will lose the player without compensation eventually, but they could cash in right now.

The upshot of the furore, short term, Hansen also reports, is that Everton were in disarray on the opening day of the Premiership season last Saturday, and were thrashed 6-1 at their own stadium by a rampant Arsenal.