Since the early 1990s, professional football in many countries has experienced an astonishing transformation.【T1】Player salaries have risen substantially, television contracts yield revenues on a scale unimaginable only a few years ago, many football stadiums have been completely rebuilt, and the importance of commercial sponsorship and merchandising has increased beyond measure. Commercial aspects of football feature regularly in the news headlines, and the media devote pages to coverage of football finances. Football’s importance is not only economic, but also social and cultural.【T2】Several million people attend matches each season, and many millions more watch football on television and follow its fortunes through coverage in the media. At the grassroots level, football’s popularity as a participant sport generates benefits for the health of the population. At the highest level, international footballing success generates intangible benefits in the form of prestige and goodwill.

Academic interest in the economic analysis of football has mirrored the growth in the sport’s popularity. In the US, economists have written and published books and scholarly articles on major league sports since the mid-1950s. Consequently, the older academic literature on sports economics is dominated by studies of sports such as baseball, basketball and (American) football.【T3】These writings shed light on a wide range of issues, including the determining factors of the compensation received by sports professionals, the nature of joint production in team sports, competitive balance, uncertainty of outcome and the distribution of playing talent in sports leagues, and the contribution of the coach or manager to team performance. The common thread linking research into all of these topics is the formulation and testing of economic hypotheses using sports as a laboratory.【T4】A major attraction of sports to empirical economists is that the availability of data permits investigation of economic propositions that would be difficult to test in other areas, owing to a lack of suitable data.

【T5】During the last decade of the old century and the first decade of the new, scholarly papers on the economics of football have been published with increasing regularity in academic journals. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in many universities study the economics of sports as part of their degree programmes. At the end of the 1990s, we felt that a monograph was needed to cover developments in the subject, and present a unifying overview of this relatively new area of academic research.

【T5】