European football: Back to the 1950s

Loek Groot

Industrial Organization from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The point of departure in this paper is the diagnosis of Hoehn and Szymanski (1999) that the interlocking system of European football creates an unbalanced system. To secure competitive balance at both the European and the national level, they recommend to reform European football into a closed superleague American-style. In this paper I argue for a radically different route. Instead of giving up dominant traditions of European football, like promotion-relegation and the interlocking system, it is possible to maintain the defining characteristics of European football by returning to the state of affairs in the 1950s, before the commercialisation of football through the media started. This requires the free of charge distribution of football matches on TV, which can be justified by standard economic welfare analysis.

Keywords: interlocking system; of European football; commercialization; Americanization; broadcasting rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D42 D60 L41 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2005-05-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-his and nep-spo
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 21. Paper about the football industry, in particular the issue of broadcasting rights, pay-per-view and competitive balance.
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/io/papers/0505/0505003.pdf (application/pdf)

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:wpa:wuwpio:0505003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Industrial Organization from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).