Thin Ice Case

The economics of sport is a rather wide field. It spreads across analyses of the demand for sport, cost-benefit analyses of sporting events and sporting venues, the local public finance implications of these same events and venues, sporting governance (meaning labor-management relations, organizational models of team or individual sports events as well as professional leagues), the business and finance of professional leagues, wage determination, labour market discrimination, trade in the sporting goods industry, media coverage, sponsoring, endorsements, and numerous related issues such as the economics of performance inhencing drugs. Broadly speaking these themes have developped from two traditions in sports economics, a Continental European one and a North American one, although there is now a trend for both traditions to merge. North Americans and their colleagues from Britain and Australia have applied the standard tools of supply and demand analysis to model the behaviour of the various participants to the world of sport. They have focused most of their attention to professional sport, more specifically men’s team sports, using advanced statistical methods such as regression analysis. On the other hand Continental European sports economics is more of the Institutionalist sort, relying more on descriptive statistics, with tables of numbers and the computation of various ratios, while sometimes applying economic theories alternative to the standard supply and demand analysis. Continental Europeans are also concerned with professional teams, but they devote more attention to the sporting goods industry (manufacturing and world trade patterns) and to the economics of amateur and recreational sport, in particular the Olympic Games. An attempt to deal with all these issues within a single chapter would yield a rather superficial analysis. The agenda of this chapter is driven by the fact that most of the academic research on the economics of sport in North America,