Professional sports leagues have witnessed the appearance of so-called "sugar daddies" - people who invest enormous amounts of money into clubs and become their owners. This paper presents a contest model of a professional sports league that incorporates this phenomenon. We analyze how the...

This paper presents a dynamic model of talent investments in a team sports league with an infinite time horizon. We show that the clubs' investment decisions and the effects of revenue sharing on competitive balance depend on the following three factors: (i) the cost function of talent...

For football executives, understanding the determinants of spectator no-show behavior better is of utmost importance. Recent research efforts, however, have primarily focused on exploring the potential effects of determinants that the club management can hardly influence (e.g., potential...

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced worldwide natural experiments on the effects of crowds. We exploit one of these experiments currently taking place over several countries in almost identical settings: professional football matches played behind closed doors. We find large and statistically...

Because no-show behavior typically leads to operational inefficiencies and thus diminishing returns for service firms, a growing number of authors have demonstrated the potential of using reminders to reduce no-show rates. In this study, by examining the behavioral responses of 13,911 season...

This paper constitutes a unique micro-level exploration of the relation between game outcome uncertainty and the behavior of highly committed season ticket holders of a major Bundesliga soccer team. Specifically, we look at 3,113 season ticket holders attending all 17 home games in the 2012-13...

For football executives, understanding the determinants of spectator no-show behavior better is of utmost importance. Recent research efforts, however, have primarily focused on exploring the potential effects of determinants that the club management can hardly influence (e.g., potential...

In the recent years, many clubs in the biggest European soccer leagues have run into debts. The sports economic literature provides several explanation for this development, e.g., the league structure (open versus closed league), club constitutions, ruinous rat races between clubs. While the...