Summary
Sport is becoming an activity of increasing importance: over time more people participate in sport (active sport consumption), more time is spent watching sport (passive sport consumption). An important part of sport consumption is passive sport consumption where production and consumption are separate: (professional) athletes engage in a contest, and fans pay to watch the contest. An important characteristic of sport that generates this demand is relative competition: the competitiveness of a particular match or league. In this paper, we set out to measure competitive balance in three sports (soccer, tennis, and skating), and assess its development over time. As we separate variation in quality of teams or athletes from randomness of outcome, we can compare relative competition in these three sports.
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Part of this paper was written when I enjoyed the hospitality of the University of Salford. I thank David Forrest, Ian McHale, and Bertus Talsma for fruitful discussions. Bertus Talsma helped to get the skating data. All calculations and graphs were done using R (R Development Core Team 2008). An Appendix with additional tables and graphs is available on www.rug.nl/staff/r.h.koning.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Koning, R.H. Sport and Measurement of Competition. De Economist 157, 229–249 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-009-9113-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-009-9113-x