INTRODUCTION

Although baseball can lay claim to be the home of sports economics in North America, association football (soccer) is the subject's primary focus in Europe. Fifteen years after Rottenberg's paper (1956), the first football paper was published on the labour market of the professional game in England (Sloane 1969). Sloane's contribution paved the way for investigations into many aspects of football from an economic perspective. This chapter purposefully aims to address three topics that are important to the economics of association football: (a) competitive balance; (b) empirical studies of attendance demand (spectator turnout); and (c) labour mobility. Notwithstanding that these are stand-alone issues addressed in detail elsewhere, we aim to provide a concise and accessible introduction to these research areas. Our intention is to offer an overview for those unfamiliar with these areas. From the outset it is important to note that the reach of the economics of football far exceeds the topics covered in this chapter. That said, the three branches we focus on here are all part of a developed literature in their own right and have a strong historical basis with solid theoretical and empirical foundations. They are also of universal interest and remain central to the economics of football today. As outlined in Chapter 1

, the need for competitive balance within sport goes to the very heart of sport economics, from where Rottenberg's (1956) examination began. We focus on the “big five” European leagues of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Second, we survey studies that examine the demand for football, focusing on the traditional form of consuming the sport, namely ticket demand (stadium attendance). We collate literature on this topic for studies published over a 45-year period and offer a brief synopsis (biased toward studies published in English), which can serve as a companion to those exploring the literature for the first time. The third and final part of the chapter examines the labour market for footballers since the early 1990s. We consider the internationalization of this market, again in the context of the “big five” leagues (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) from 1992 to 2015, and describe a new dataset on the topic.