Increase competitive balance in European football: a strategic approach

Over the last two decades, European football has gone through massive structural changes. The end of foreign player quotas (Bosman ruling) and substantial increases in revenue have paved the way toward today’s two-speed Football hierarchy. Top teams’ revenues have increased exponentially while there has been little change in revenues for lower budget clubs. As a result, a trend of competitive imbalance has emerged. UEFA has tried to address these problems with Financial Fair Play (FFP), a regulation system which obliges teams to respect the principle of “break even”, meaning that clubs must not finance themselves with loans and “favors” from wealthy owners. While FFP has been successful in limiting clubs’ indebtedness and ensuring long term viability, it does not have the capacity to deal with competitive imbalance. As long as unequal distributions of revenue persist among teams and leagues, the issue of competitive imbalance will not be solved. This paper focuses on identifying recommendations that could lead to improved competitive balance in football. What would better competitive balance achieve for fans? With player talent more equally distributed, outcomes of matches and league competitions would be more difficult to predict and thus more enjoyable for spectators to follow. In arriving at the recommendations that are presented in this work, measures that have been successfully adopted in other professional sports are examined and tested. Firstly, the distribution of TV revenue in the UEFA Champions League is tackled. By emphasising the importance of one home TV market (market pool), UEFA does not treat all teams equally. Therefore, a system of distribution without market pooling has been developed and proposed. Secondly, the salary cap system was found to be a very effective tool in promoting increased financial equality among clubs and within leagues. Thirdly, the possibility of introducing a playoff system in football was addressed. Playoffs would increase the uncertainty of outcomes until post-season, however, implementation would be complex and would require changes in the number of teams per league. The results of this research reveal that tools to promote competitive balance do indeed exist, however, implementation barriers are quite high. Also, to avoid the threat of top teams deciding to break away and creating their own leagues if the regulating measures are too severe, compromises will be necessary in terms of the strictness of measures that will be adopted and applied

Onside: A Reconsideration of Soccer's Cultural Future in the United States

Throughout the course of the 20th century, professional sports have evolved to become a predominant aspect of many societies’ popular cultures. Though sports and related physical activities had existed long before 1900, the advent of industrial economies, specifically growing middle classes and ever-improving methods of communication in countries worldwide, have allowed sports to be played and followed by more people than ever before. As a result, certain games have captured the hearts and minds of so many people in such a way that a culture of following the particular sport has begun to be emphasized over the act of actually doing or performing the sport. One needs to look no further than the hours of football talk shows scheduled weekly on ESPN or the myriad of analytical articles published online and in newspapers daily for evidence of how following and talking about sports has taken on cultural priority over actually playing the sport. Defined as “hegemonic sports cultures” by University of Michigan sociologists Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman, these sports are the ones who dominate “a country’s emotional attachments rather than merely representing its callisthenic activities.” Soccer is the world’s game. This phrase, though oft-repeated to the point of becoming cliché, holds true in the sporting cultures of nearly every country around the globe, with one glaring exception: The United States of America. Indeed, where most countries’ cultural “sport spaces” are dominated by two sports, the United States is proud of its “Big Four”: American football, basketball, baseball, and ice hockey, represented professionally by the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL, respectively. Each of these four leagues is regarded as the highest level of competition for its sport in the world, and all four are among the top six sports leagues by revenue worldwide. How is it, then, that soccer has failed to establish the roots of a hegemonic sports culture in America, a country with such vast sociopolitical influence over the rest of the world for much of the 20th century and one that also takes great cultural pride in athletic accomplishment? The previously mentioned Markovits and Hellerman provide some theories in their 2001 work Offside: Soccer & American Exceptionalism, where they argue that in the period from 1870 – 1930, a critical 60-year juncture of sports investment in the West and a time of heightened nativism in America, soccer was essentially crowded-out by the rise of non-European sports: baseball and football, and then basketball and ice hockey later on. At the time of their writing, Markovits and Hellerman were not very optimistic about the future of soccer in the United States. Using related sociological works about sport, quantitative data from FIFA, and other sources that comment on the evolution of American culture into the 21st century, I plan on painting an updated, optimistic picture of soccer’s future in the United States, where I one day believe that it will establish itself as a hegemonic sports culture akin to the Big Four.Histor

The Playful Citizen

This edited volume collects current research by academics and practitioners on playful citizen participation through digital media technologies

The Success Of A Nation's Soccer Team: A Bellwether Regarding A Nation's Electronic Information Infrastructure, The Legal Regulations That Govern The Infrastructure, The Resulting Citizen-Trust In Its Government And Its E-Readiness In Nigeria, The DPRK, China, Japan, South Korea, The Netherlands And The United States

This article discusses a bellwether regarding a nation's electronic information infrastructure, the legal regulations that govern the infrastructure, the resulting citizen-trust in its government and its e-readiness in seven countries