Sports economics: it may be fun but what’s the point?

Economists’ interest in sports has grown dramatically in Europe and North America over the past twenty years. Today there are two journals devoted to sports economics,¹ and much-cited symposia have appeared in Applied Economics, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Productivity Analysis, Labour Economics, Oxford Review of Economic Policy and Scottish Journal of Political Economy. This might have been pretty difficult for Simon Rottenberg to imagine when he wrote perhaps the first sports economics article in the Journal of Political Economy back in 1956.

¹These are the Journal of Sports Economics and the International Journal of Sport Finance.