Monday, 2 July 2007, 15:04
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American football has joined the long list of sports leagues with rules restricting sports reporting in order to protect exclusive broadcast rights. Rafat Ali has some funny video showing the effects.
Wednesday, 13 June 2007, 17:49
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The SJA blog links the NCAA’s blogging ban to similar efforts in football and rugby
Saturday, 19 May 2007, 18:12
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"[Jonathan] Pearce who literally had hold of [Didier] Drogba in what was almost a WWE-style headlock. He got his interview, but Drogba could say nothing of interest."
Are pricy footballers worth the cost?
Tuesday, 30 August 2005, 16:17
The FT today has a story about research by a Cass Business School professor who questions the high cost of footballers’ transfer fees makes financial sense to Premiership clubs.
Gilad Livne argues that new accounting rules mean that football managers will have to disclose all transfer fess on their clubs’ balance sheets. His research into 58 clubs shows that high transfer fee players “might not enhance profitability or cash flow”.
Of course, football fans would argue that their club’s share price isn&rsqou;t, shall we say, the most pressing dependent variable. Victories in a season, perhaps, would be a better indication of whether that big signing was value for money.
The excellent JunkCharts blog, which tracks dodgy visualisations of statistics in the news, notices just this kind of story, albeit about about the baseball clubs’s payrolls, in the New York Times. This one has the advantage of using the only dependent variable that anyone reading the sports page will care about.
But Junk Charts points out that the Times gets the statistics wrong: &ldquo there appears to be a general association between payroll and winningness”.
It would be interesting to see the same thing done for the Premiership. If Livne Livne is right, the requisite dataset of transfer fees may soon become available.
