Predicting Rory

Journalists like to tell stories.  They mix in some analysis into their stories, but as more garnish than main course.  After Rory McIlroy's bad Sunday at the Masters in April, it was all about "the collapse."  A Golf.com article captures the emotional angst angle dominating the post-Masters' coverage: It's because the expectations were so high, and the stakes so huge. History shows that players who cough up big leads in big tournaments often don't get another chance,  their  psyche permanently shattered by thoughts of what might have been. For two months, McIlroy could not escape the "collapse" questions -- probably […]

Clippers -- Lessons from Losers

Recently, on the NBA Network I caught the tail end of a conversation between Kenny Smith and another announcer about the LA Clippers.  Maybe there are less successful franchises by some metric, but the Clippers must be in the mix in any discussion of trees that never bear fruit (see Pro Basketball Reference).   If this season's trend continues, the Clips will record 1 winning season in the last 14 and 2 out of the last 18.  In half of these seasons, they have won less than one-third of their games. Long losing streaks (for example WKU football) or extremely […]

Announcing the New Quebec City Arena...

Big news out of Quebec today.  The Province of Quebec and the Quebec City government announced formal plans to build a new arena in Quebec City.  The new facility will be 100% publicly financed, with the province and the city each picking up half of the cost.  The plan is to build the arena in hopes of attracting an NHL franchise back to Quebec City, which has been without a franchise since the Nordiques left for Colorado in 1995. Kids, don't try this at home.  Building an arena before you have a major league tenant under contract is not for […]

Quick Notes & Links

The NHL is thumping its chest over an excellent season for business.  Says Commissioner Gary Bettman, ""By whatever method of measurement you want to use -- be it ratings, revenues, page views, video starts, sponsor activations or simply the quality of play – the game, the players, the fans, our clubs and our partners teamed up to make 2009-10 a season to remember."  Here at TSE, we do tend to focus on things like ratings, revenues, and, uh...,  attendance as measures of league health, which is not mentioned in the article.  Checking ESPN's data (as yet not quite complete), average […]

Does NFL Success Matter for Communities?

Maybe only steroid discussions stirs the blood of sports economists quite like questions about the impacts of sports on communities, largely because of the tie-in with debates over public funding for stadiums. Let me be very clear on a couple of points. 1) The quantitative work in economics by people such as the TSE's Brad Humphreys and Dennis Coates casts serious doubt on the supposed tax revenue and direct economic development benefits of sports stadiums beyond the imaginations of civic "boosters." 2) The existence of broader, indirect impacts on income, wages, or intangible enjoyment by some citizens do not provide […]

BraveRocks? Brave Lochs? Curling and Congestion in Scotland

Last week it looked as if the Royal Caledonia Curling Club (RCCC) would be able to host a Grand Match of curling on Lake of Monteith near Aberfoyle, Scotland. The Grand Match is a gigantic curling competition in which as many as 2000 curlers compete, and the weather has co-operated so little that it has been held only 38 times since 1837; it was last held in 1979. This year the temperatures had been below freezing for several weeks leading up to the planned event and the ice was forming nicely on Lake of Monteith, which has nice ice for […]

Report: Lower Ticket Prices for Women's Basketball is Due to Institutional Sexism

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed.: "Colleges charge a premium for admission to see males play, even when women's basketball teams are ranked as among the very best performers in the nation," write the authors, Laura Pappano and Allison J. Tracy, both of the Wellesley Centers for Women. By charging less for admission to highly ranked women's games, the authors say, athletics departments engage in "institutional discrimination that is camouflaged as sensible economic practice." The report analyzed ticket prices at every level, from single-game to season tickets, at 292 Division I colleges. The results showed that ticket prices for women's […]

Baseball Stadium Quirks

From Frank Deford at Sports Illustrated: Myself, speaking for students of baseball, I'm sorry, but in constructing some things, the trick is not to run away from nostalgia, but simply to monkey around with it and try to gussy it up a bit. Architecturally, baseball parks are like mousetraps. No one has found a way to build a better one than the Orioles did in 1992, when they gave Camden Yards to a grateful world. All of the 18 major league fields and scores of minor league parks built since then have been wise enough to follow that pretty model. […]

They Stand, We Sit

From the WSJ (HT to my colleague Ishuan Li) comes a story about why world soccer fans prefer to stand and US sports fans sit. It goes back to "the middle ages, when the nobility sat and the common plebs stood," says Rod Sheard, senior principle of the leading sports architecture firm Populous and designer of the Emirates. "All of America is nobility. Everyone thinks they're king in America." Indeed, 19th-century baseball fans in the U.S. quickly developed higher standards for comfort than British soccer fans, says Steven Riess, author of "Sport in Industrial America, 1850-1920." "I think there was […]

NY Stadium Deals

I have been asked by numerous reporters why state and local governments continue to fund stadium subsidies if they don't pay off in economic development benefits. Among the answers I give is that the public officials get really good seats in exchange for the support. Which brings me to one of the new developments in the Yankee Stadium saga. The mayor's office sent Randy Levine of the Yankees memorializing their agreement that while Mayor Bloomberg is in office that the City will not use the "luxury suite and accompanying twelve (12) seat box at the new Yankee Stadium". The Yankees […]

Government Complaint Against Rod Blagojevich Regarding Public Funding for the Cubs

Rarely do we see the behind-the-scenes maneuvers when it comes to government and the sports business, but this arrest of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has done just this. A criminal complaint containing, among other things, charges related to public funding for Wrigley Field was posted over at the Volokh Conspiracy. According to the complaint, the public funding was being used as a threat to get the Tribune Company to fire journalists who weren't friendly to Blagojevich. I post the entire complaint from VC below since most of it, in one way or another, deals with the Cubs. Government Attempt to […]

Beijing Olympic Games Open

The opening ceremonies of the Beijing Summer Olympic games are today. I wrote a short article for the July/August issue of Foreign Policy on some of the financial aspects of the Olympic Games. Among the highlights ... the IOC took in over $4.2 billion in the Salt Lake/Athens cycle, mostly from broadcast rights and sponsorship, and keeps an increasing share of the revenues; you really have to pay to play the Olympic hosting game: unsuccessful bids to host the games typically cost from $22 million to almost $50 million; the cost over-runs in host countries are huge; and although it […]