European Football: Market Potential and Competition Dynamics
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Abstract
The article discusses recent competitive dynamics of professional men professional football in Europe. Due to ongoing commercialisation process and institutional reforms reshaping the industry, combined with specific cultural and social role fulfilled by the discipline, numerous empirical analyses have shown that the hierarchy of the top teams have become more persistent over the decades. While dominance being arguably a natural outcome of professional sports due to its main aim, which is competing for wins, strong connection of the capacity of clubs to economic and demographic potential of cities and countries hosting them and asymmetric distribution of the development level of urban areas, it has been shown that European football is much less dynamically balanced than, for example, Northern American major leagues of team sports.In the article, we employ dynamic panel modelling techniques and Elo ranking for European clubs, allowing for direct and dynamic comparison of their sport strength, to investigate interseason and within-league relations. The results suggest that the dynamic relation is strong, supporting the thesis about existence of the self-reinforcing process of building level of teams. However, the support for identification of more complex intra-league relations is limited.
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