Did the UEFA Champions League winners start in an easy group?

Antonio Avila-Cano () and Francisco Triguero-Ruiz
Additional contact information
Francisco Triguero-Ruiz: Department of Languages and Computer Sciences, University of Málaga, Málaga, Spain

Journal of Economic Analysis, 2024, vol. 3, issue 3, 161-172

Abstract: Competitive balance indicates the degree of control participating teams have over a sports competition. Supporters look for excuses to justify their team’s defeat and the triumph of their rivals. If the competition has required a preliminary qualifying group stage, they will argue that the winning team was in an "easy group" from the start, and their team was unlucky to be in a "difficult group". It is therefore of interest to determine what is an "easy group" and what is a "difficult group". This is directly related to the concept of competitive balance. We have a wide range of indices to measure competitive balance. We will use the Distance to Competitive Balance, a standardized index that complies cardinality property. The perfectly unbalanced distribution is the truncated cascade, which allows the maximum value of concentration to be obtained. We focus our attention on the UEFA Champions League, before and after competition, and we measure the competitive balance of the qualifying stage groups between the 1999/2000 and 2022/2023 seasons. The composition of the UEFA Champions League groups seems to be balanced and has no influence on which team will be the champion. A highly competitive group will be more "difficult" in terms of qualifying than a highly concentrated one. Supporters say that their team was unlucky to be in a “difficult” group, but the data does not prove them right.

Keywords: Sports economics; Competitive balance; UEFA Champions League; Distance to Competitive Balance. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.anserpress.org/journal/jea/3/3/71/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.anserpress.org/journal/jea/3/3/71 (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:bba:j00001:v:3:y:2024:i:3:p:161-172:d:228

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Analysis is currently edited by Ramona Wang

More articles in Journal of Economic Analysis from Anser Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ramona Wang ().