“The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes, everything else is pure theoryâ€

Peter-J. Jost

Journal of Sports Economics, 2021, vol. 22, issue 1, 27-74

Abstract: We model a soccer match between two heterogeneous teams as a two-stage contest where each team chooses its attacking and defending effort for each half of the match. We characterize the optimal teams’ efforts as well as the optimal effort allocation between offense and defense. In contrast to the theoretical literature on soccer we show, for example, that the leading team may preempt its competitor in the first half. Our analysis also sheds new light on empirical studies that investigate the change in winning points on the number of ties by showing that this effect depends crucially on teams’ heterogeneity.

Keywords: team contest; sports economics; soccer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1527002520939614 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jospec:v:22:y:2021:i:1:p:27-74

DOI: 10.1177/1527002520939614

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Sports Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().