We show that both talent and popularity significantly contribute to stars' market values in German soccer. The talent-versus-popularity controversy on the sources of stardom goes back to Rosen (1981) and Adler (1985). All attempts to resolve the controversy empirically face the difficulty of accurately identifying talent. In professional sports, rank-order tournaments help in ascertaining talent. Analyzing a team setting, we use 20 different performance indicators to estimate a player's talent according to his ability to increase the team's winning probability. (JEL J31, J44, L83)The phenomenon of Superstars, wherein small numbers of people earn enormous amounts of money and dominate the activities in which they engage, seems to be increasingly important in the modern world (Rosen 1981, 845).

The new UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations have encountered stiff criticism. The concerns are that the new regulations may harm football in three different ways: By forgoing the potential benefits from substantial injections of "external" money into payrolls, by restricting competition in the player market without at the same time achieving benefits from more balanced competition, and by creating some sort of barrier to entry which could "freeze" the current hierarchy of clubs. It is the purpose of this paper to take these concerns as a starting point for discussing the likely effects of the new regulations.As a by-product it will become obvious why and in which points the concerns are unfounded.

The purpose of this study is to analyze whether previous results describing the effect of uncertainty of outcome on match attendance in team sports have been driven by heterogeneity in fan demand. We apply censored quantile regression methods and place particular emphasis on the relationship between match uncertainty and attendance demand, as previous results are highly ambiguous. This is more surprising, as each season association and league officials continue to spend millions on enhancing this uncertainty. We also control for season ticket holders, who are unlikely to be influenced by match specificities. Based on data from German soccer, our results indicate that fan demand shows heterogeneity across quantiles and that increasing match uncertainty of outcome exclusively benefits teams who already face strong attendance demand. DO SOCCER ASSOCIATIONS REALLY SPEND ON A GOOD THING? EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON HETEROGENEITY IN THE CONSUMER RESPONSE TO MATCH UNCERTAINTY OF OUTCOME MEN-ANDRI BENZ, LEIF BRANDES and EGON FRANCK*The purpose of this study is to analyze whether previous results describing the effect of uncertainty of outcome on match attendance in team sports have been driven by heterogeneity in fan demand. We apply censored quantile regression methods and place particular emphasis on the relationship between match uncertainty and attendance demand, as previous results are highly ambiguous. This is more surprising, as each season association and league officials continue to spend millions on enhancing this uncertainty. We also control for season ticket holders, who are unlikely to be influenced by match specificities. Based on data from German soccer, our results indicate that fan demand shows heterogeneity across quantiles and that increasing match uncertainty of outcome exclusively benefits teams who already face strong attendance demand. (JEL D12, C14, C24, L83)

We analyze the price impact of sentimental bettor preferences within a bookmaker betting market. A theoretical model demonstrates that, under reasonable assumptions about the nature of demand in a market with strong competition, the bookmaker will offer lower prices for bets with comparatively stronger demand. Using a sample of more than 16,000 English soccer matches we find evidence that more favorable odds are extended to bets on more popular clubs and that this effect is amplified on weekends when sentimental bettors face lower opportunity costs to wager. Our findings help to explain why the market for sports gambling operates as a hybrid structure with bookmakers able to attract a considerable share of the betting volume, although identical contracts are traded on exchange markets at lower costs: the organizational design of a quote‐driven market enables the dealer to take advantage of sentimental bettor preferences.

The peculiar German football governance structure may be well suited to prevent integrity problems resulting from multiple club ownership or from ownership by "undesired'' persons or entities. However, this effect comes at a price. In the vacuum of power generated within large member associations, residual rights of control are de facto allocated to representatives who do not hold residual claims. Because these representatives externalize substantial parts of the risk associated with investment decisions, they are particularly ill-suited for managing the business of professional football, which has been transformed into a "gamble on success'' by ever-increasing revenue differentials between winners and losers. At the same time, low accounting standards for members clubs, combined with "soft'' law enforcement, invite club representatives to hide their consumption on the job behavior until their clubs are insolvent.

This paper applies contest theory to provide an integrated framework of a team sports league and analyzes the competitive interaction between clubs. We show that dissipation of the league revenue arises from ‘overinvestment’ in playing talent as a direct consequence of the ruinous competitive interaction between clubs. This overinvestment problem increases if the discriminatory power of the contest function increases, revenue‐sharing decreases, and the size of an additional exogenous prize increases. We further show that clubs invest more when they play in an open league compared with a closed league. Moreover, the overinvestment problem within open leagues increases with the revenue differential between leagues.

The impact of intra-team pay dispersion on team productivity is a highly discussed issue. On the one hand, wage differentials provide incentives for higher employee effort. On the other hand, pay inequality may reduce team cohesiveness and increase feelings of relative deprivation leading to lower performance. Analysing nonlinear effects of wage dispersion in professional soccer, we find empirical evidence that team performance is strongest when there is either very high or very low wage inequality. Medium levels produce the weakest team performance. In addition, we show that the pay structure affects the team's playing style even after controlling for team and coach heterogeneity. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications as well as the limits of generalization.

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