This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature asks whether an American-style revenue-sharing system would be better for European football leagues than the current laissez-faire approach. Two fairly obvious potential benefits:
1. Smaller clubs would be able to compete in the transfer market and, as a result, to challenge for trophies. This would [...]

OVERTURE
A television commercial in which the burden of meaning is carried by a shot of a large silver and black map of the world on which the land is full of tiny holes of slightly varying diameters as though it had been stuck with pins only there are beams of brilliant light shining up [...]

Here are two beliefs which seem to be widespread among intelligent soccer fans online.
1. That football is too much in the pocket of business interests whose treatment of the game as a commodity weakens its ties to local communities and takes it away from its traditional fans.
2. That racism and regional prejudice have [...]

Dani Rodrik has a good follow-up post on globalization and football. Among other worthwhile links, he points to a paper in the August Journal of Finance (you have to pay to read it, but can see the abstract for free) which appears to show that national team losses lead to declining stock markets. (Economists: is [...]

A number of prominent economics and policy blogs have started an interesting discussion today on the effects of globalization in football. The political economist Dani Rodrik looks at the influx of African players into European leagues and considers the implications for national teams and for the quality of domestic play in Africa:
[I]t is likely that [...]