THEORY OF THE BEAUTIFUL GAME: THE UNIFICATION OF EUROPEAN FOOTBALL
| Date | 01 July 2007 |
| Published date | 01 July 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.2007.00418.x |
| Author | John Vrooman |
THEORY OF THE BEAUTIFUL GAME:
THE UNIFICATION OF EUROPEAN
FOOTBALL
John Vrooman
n
Abstract
European football is in a spiral of intra-league and inter-league polarization of
talent and wealth. The invariance proposition is revisited with adaptations for win-
maximizing sportsman owners facing an uncertain Champions League prize.
Sportsman and champion effects have driven European football clubs to the edge of
insolvency and polarized competition throughout Europe. Revenue revolutions and
financial crises of the Big Five leagues are examined and estimates of competitive
balance are compared. The European Super League completes the open-market
solution after Bosman. A 30-team Super League is proposed based on the National
Football League.
In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
FSartre
I Intro ductio n
The beauty of the world’s game of football lies in the dynamic balance
of symbiotic competition. Since the English Premier League (EPL) broke
away from the Football League in 1992, the EPL has effectively lost its
competitive balance. The rebellion of the EPL coincided with a deeper media
revolution as digital and pay-per-view technologies were delivered by satellite
platform into the commercial television vacuum created by public television
monopolies throughout Europe. EPL broadcast revenues have exploded
40-fold from h22 million in 1992 to h862 million in 2005 (33% CAGR).
Average annual fees for the 2007–2010 rights contract have reached h1.24
billion, excluding bonus money from European competition. EPL fashions itself
as the ‘greatest show on earth,’ but this may only be true for the top tier of its
clubs. The top five clubs in EPL, German Bundesliga and French Ligue 1
currently receive about one-half of their league’s revenues, while the top five
clubs in Italian Serie A and Spanish la Liga capture two-thirds of league
n
Vanderbilt University.
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revenues.
1
Revenue disparity is magnified on the pitch, where dominance of
large revenue clubs is certain before kick-off. Over the last 20 years, Italian Serie
A has been the most pre-determined of the Big Five leagues. There is evidence in
this analysis that over the last decade, the EPL has become as predictable as the
polarized Italian premier league. Optimal competitive balance remains an
empirical question, but when competitive outcomes become virtually certain the
beautiful game is dying.
Beyond the national boundaries of provincial leagues lies the grander market-
scape of European Economic Unification in 1992. In this wider economic
context, the European Court of Justice solved part of European football’s
competitive imbalance problem in its famous Bosman decision in 1995.
The Court found that transfer payments for out-of-contract players and
foreign player quotas were both sideways with the Treaty of Rome.
2
According
to the Coasian invariance proposition in sports economics, the transfer
decision would have no impact on competitive balance, but it would increase
player salaries and reduce exploitation. The quota-illegality part of Bosman
was potentially more powerful because it created a single European football
labor market. The problem is that while football labor markets were
opening, national leagues remained closed. Asymmetric freedom in open labor
markets and closed national leagues distorts the distribution of talent among
European leagues. The simultaneous emergence of Champions League from a
knockout European Cup tournament since 1992 reflects a series of ad hoc
concessions of UEFA to quell revolutionary threats of a breakaway European
1
Over the last decade, EPL, Ligue 1 and Bundesliga negotiated TV contracts collectively,
while Serie A and La Liga teams negotiated individually. Collective selling of EPL rights has
been under the constant scrutiny of Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the European
Commission. OFT lost a rare court case in 1999 when the Restrictive Trade Practices Court
ruled that neither EPL’s collective selling of rights nor BSkyB’s exclusive purchase of those
rights was against the public interest. In a 2002 investigation, OFT concluded that BSkyB held a
dominant position (over 50%) in the pay television sports market, but that it did not abuse its
position by ‘squeezing the margin’ downstream. EC has twice tried to limit BSkyB’s exclusivity
by splitting the rights packages in the 2003 and 2006 EPL auctions. In 2003, BSkyB retained
exclusivity with the highest bid for all three packages. In 2006, European Commission forced
EPL rights to be split into six packages of 23 games each. BSkyB acquired four and Setanta
acquired two. In theory, competitive bidding increases rights fees upstream to EPL and
decreases subscription rates to consumers downstream. Given the market power of EPL, only
the first part holds true in England. OFT/EC notion of welfare concerns the number of games
televised, more than the subscription price. The number of games broadcast has increased from
18 games in 1992 to 138 games in 2007–2010.
2
European Court of Justice December 15, 1995: Union Royales Belge des Societes de Football
ASBL v Jean-Marc Bosman (Case C-415/93 [1996] (hereinafter Bosman). Bosman was a
journeyman footballer placed on the transfer list of RC Liege in Belgian Division 1 for transfer
fee h290,000, after expiration of his second contract in 1990. The fee was a multiple of
his wage and age. After failing to attract interest from Belgian clubs, Bosman received
an offer from French Ligue 2 club Dunkerque, but Dunkerque and Liege could not agree on
transfer fee. Bosman sued, claiming that compensation fees and the 312 rule (three foreign
players plus two 5-year assimilated players) against EU players violated Article 48 (revised 39)
of the Treaty of Rome, which ensures free movement of workers within the EU without
discrimination.
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Super-League.
3
It is argued in this paper that UEFA’s Champions League
distorts domestic league competition, and that a breakaway European Super
League (ESL) is the next logical step toward the inevitable unification of
European football.
Theory of professional sports has been preoccupied by the invariance
proposition that talent distribution among teams is invariant with respect to
ownership (Quirk and Fort, 1992; Fort and Quirk, 1995; Vrooman, 1995, 2000).
Weak-form invariance holds that competitive balance among teams before and
after Bosman would be the same, and that the only difference would be zero-sum
rent shifting from club-owners to players as wages rise and transfer fees fall.
Strong-form invariance maintains that labor market restrictions will not affect
competitive balance and that competitive-balance rules, such as revenue sharing
and salary caps, will only lead to greater exploitation of talent. The only way to
alter the dominance of large revenue clubs is by reducing their home-market
monopoly position, rather than increasing their labor market monopsony
power. After Bosman, European theorists (Szymanski, 2003, 2004; Szymanski
and Kesenne, 2003; Kesenne, 2005) claimed that invariance depends on
assumptions of closed labor markets (fixed talent with variable wages) that
characterize North American leagues. In the open markets (infinite talent at a
parametric wage) of post-Bosman Europe, it is argued that the invariance
proposition does not hold, and that revenue sharing would lead to greater
imbalance. The open-market model implies that wages would be lower and
competitive balance would be higher than closed markets. In the end, the
simplifying assumptions, game-theoretic distinctions and questionable conclu-
sions of the open model do not make any difference in the twisted reality of post-
Bosman European football.
Both closed and open labor market models are based on assumptions that
club-owners are profit maximizers. It is more likely that sports-owners are
sportsmen who are willing to sacrifice profit in order to win (Sloane, 1971;
Kesenne, 1996, 2007; Vrooman 1997a, 2000). At the limit, sportsman owners are
win-maximizers who seek to win at any cost. The sportsman effect is constrained
by zero-profit, rather than maximum profit, and the question of whether labor
markets are closed or open is irrelevant. If owners are sportsmen, then intuition
prevails over paradox, and revenue sharing and salary caps should improve
competitive balance. Previous models also assume that revenue functions are
strictly concave reflections of the Yankee/Man-U paradox (fans prefer close wins
3
Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) is the governing body for European
football and runs European international club competitions Champions League and the
consolation UEFA Cup, and national-team tournaments such as European Football
Championship (EURO). UEFA is one of six continental associations of Fe
´de
´ration
Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which is the world association’s governing
body that runs the World Cup. G-14 is the lobby group for 18 of the top revenue clubs in
Europe (originally 14 clubs when formed in 2000). G-14 is now suing FIFA for damages to
Belgian club Charleroi, whose player was injured in an international match. G-14 is challenging
FIFA’s authority to make collective decisions for clubs who are not directly represented in the
Federation. The case is now before European Court of Justice, the same Court that rendered
Bosman.
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