In this comprehensive Handbook, John Goddard and Peter Sloane present a collection of analytical contributions by internationally regarded scholars in the field, which extensively examine the many economic challenges facing the world's most popular team sport.

The “distance effect” measuring the elasticity of trade flows to distance has been to be rising since the early 1970s in a host of studies based on the gravity model, leading observers to call it the “distance puzzle”. We review the evidence and explanations. Using an extensive data set...