The competition rules and policy framework of the European Union represents an important institutional restriction for doing sports business. Driven by the courts, the 2007 overhaul of the approach and methodology has increased the scope of competition policy towards sports associations and...

The collective sale of football broadcasting rights constitutes a cartel, which, in the European Union, is only allowed if it complies with a number of conditions and obligations, inter alia, partial unbundling and the no-single-buyer rule. These regulations were defined with traditional...

There are noticeable conceptual differences between competing concepts for organizing the highest level of European Football. One major conceptual controversy is concerned with the question whether fans have a stronger preference for (more) games between the top teams over a broad participation...

The controversy around the breakaway European Super League, set to conquer the UEFA Champions League, and the surrounding antitrust proceedings revive the academic discussion about the monopoly power of sport-internal governing bodies (like the UEFA), the justification for and limits of their...

"Financial Regulation and International Competitiveness: The Case of the German Bundesliga": The paper discusses the intensively discussed problem of financial crisis, overburdening debts and insolvencies in professional European football. The academic literature identifies several special...

In this paper, we discuss from an economic perspective two alternative views of restrictions of competition by sports associations. The horizontal approach views such restrictions as an agreement among the participants of a sports league with the sports association merely representing an...

This paper provides an economic analysis of the competition effects of UEFA's financial fair play regulations. It concludes that the restrictive effects of the break-even rule cannot be justified by a legitimate objective defense (according to European competition policy) because significant...

We try to better understand possible reasons for deviations between statistically-measured competitive balance (CB) and perceived CB. Moreover, we suggest answers to the following questions: are there specific dimensions of CB that are perceived to be significantly less balanced in the Danish...

The theory of competitive balance represents one of the core concepts of sports economics. Based upon an international research project analyzing the perception of competitive balance by consumers (Pawlowski 2013a, 2013b; Pawlowski & Budzinski 2013, 2014), we argue in this paper that behavioural...

Ever since the pioneering work of Rottenberg (1956) and Neale (1964), the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH) has played a major role in the economic analysis of professional sport leagues. However, decades f empirical research have not been successful in establishing clear evidence for the...