Four cases in sports competition policy: Baseball, judo, football, and motor racing

Oliver Budzinski

No 109, Ilmenau Economics Discussion Papers from Ilmenau University of Technology, Institute of Economics

Abstract: Practices and conducts in professional and even amateur sports can be subject to competition laws as soon as commercial activities are involved. From an economic perspective, this implies that both directly commercial activities like the sale of broadcasting/media rights and indirectly commercial activities like defining and enforcing the rules of the games can be hit by competition policy interventions. Setting and enforcing the rules of the game is an activity with commercial effects because it influences attractiveness and marketability of the sports in question. After discussing fundamental issues, this contributions reviews selected landmark cases in sports competition policy from an economic perspective. This includes the U.S. baseball antitrust exemption, access rules to Judo tournaments, sale systems of media rights in European football as well as a unique combination of long-run exclusivity contracts, skewed allocation of common revenues, and special influences on rule-setting by some competitors in Formula One motor racing. Eventually, the areas of state aid to football clubs and mergers in Danish football are sketched.

Keywords: sports economics; antitrust; competition policy; baseball; judo; football; soccer; motor racing; formula one; media rights; sports broadcasting; competitive balance; cartels; abuse of dominance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K21 L40 L82 L83 Z20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cul, nep-law and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/171346/1/897666739.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:zbw:tuiedp:109

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ilmenau Economics Discussion Papers from Ilmenau University of Technology, Institute of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().