Last year I wrote a series of posts that sought to find out the marginal payroll costs per point earned in Major League Soccer. This year I repeat the same analysis for the just-concluded 2012 regular season.As was the case last year, I calculated team payrolls using player base salary data from the MLS Players […]
When I’m shuttered away in my home office hacking code or trying to figure out how I’m going to make money, I fail to notice certain events. And one of those events was a really big one — Stefan Szymanski is now at the University of Michigan!Dr. Szymanski was until recently a noted economics professor […]
Erik van den Berg, “The Valuation of Human Capital in the Football Player Transfer Market: An investigation on transfer fees paid and received in the English Premier League”, M.Sc. Thesis, Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, July 2011. [Link] I was doing a search for something in preparation for my Advisory Board meeting and came […]
Over the last couple of days I read a pair of articles that followed on some previous posts of mine. I retweeted one, but I haven't mentioned the other until now.The first is the conversation that Moneyball writer Michael Lewis and Billy Beane had about the book, the movie, and the state of analytics in […]
Continuing my look at the finances and on-field results of Major League Soccer, I expand my earlier financial determinism study to the period between 2007 and 2011. This period covers the entire Designated Player era. (more…)
I was looking for other publications that explored the connection between payroll and performance in other American team sports, and came across this interesting series of articles by ESPN's Patrick Hruby published at the beginning of the year on front-office efficiency in American sports leagues. He covers the Big Four sports leagues as well as […]
Now that the 2011 MLS Cup Playoffs are in full swing, I've taken a look back at the just-completed regular season with a post on the relationship between payroll and league performance and another on the marginal payroll cost per point won in the league. In this post, I'll expand the marginal payroll cost study […]
Following on from my previous post on the relationship between Major League Soccer payrolls and on-field performance, I consider how efficient league teams have been in the 2011 regular season. I seek to answer the question, What is an MLS team's cost per point relative to the league average? (more…)
The Political Economy of Football website has published a list of the top 30 European clubs in attendance of domestic league matches over the past three seasons. It makes for very interesting reading. The top three or four teams are those that you would expect to see, such as Manchester United, Barcelona, and Real Madrid, […]
I have been looking for reports on the business model of football clubs in South America for some time, in particular the larger (in an economic sense) South American nations such as Brazil, Mexico, or Chile. Jérôme Osselaer has written a detailed analysis on the financial model of Brazilian clubs ranging from profit and loss […]
