A book of two halves

Alex Krumer
Faculty of Business Administration and Social Sciences, Molde University College

In recent years, there is a growing number of books written by economists about sports (e.g., “Soccernomics” by Kuper and Szymanski, “The Beautiful Game Theory” by Palacios-Huerta, “Economist Goes to the Game” by Oyer). Footynomicks is another book that tries to look at the economic factors that relate to sports.

The book is divided into two halves. The first is devoted to the case of Australia, a country that has four codes of football (rugby union, rugby league, soccer, and Australian rules football). The second is composed of selected essays that are disconnected from the first half, and not necessarily connected between each other.

My expectation from the title of the book that was written by an economist was that this book is based on sports economics literature. However, this wasn’t the case. In fact, most of the parts that I liked were based on sociological and historical aspects of Australian sports. However, I was disappointed with the economic arguments provided in the book.

As a non-Australian myself, I very much enjoyed most parts of the first half of the book. It starts with an excellent introduction of the four different codes. Then, it dives into historical development of each one of them, and their coexistence within Australia where different geographic and demographic segments determined the exposure of each code. This is a fascinating and unique story of the struggle of each code to become commercial.

I was looking for more discussion on why public investments in sports facilities can be a bad idea. After all, there is a large body of evidence in sports economics literature about it.

The soccer fans would be very interested in the discussion of “why is it that Australia, amongst the most culturally British of the former colonies, took to rugby and cricket when Argentina, Egypt and Azerbaijan were seduced by football?” For those interested in additional codes of football, Chapter 6 describes American football, along with less known Canadian and Gaelic codes.

Then there comes an interesting case of Tasmania. For many years, Tasmania was regarded by the Australian Football League (AFL) as too small and poor; however, the recent economic growth and political climate described in the book are about to create a Tasmanian team in the AFL. This case is described from different angles that include economics, sociology and political science.

While I enjoyed the sociological and political science parts of the Tasmanian case, I was dissatisfied with the economic arguments. I was looking for more discussion on why public investments in sports facilities can be a bad idea. After all, there is a large body of evidence in sports economics literature about it. I refer the interested reader to Bradbury et al. (2024), who present robust evidence that stadiums are not economic development catalysts and confer limited social benefits.

It is, however, worth noting that the author mentions that “some critics believe that the money would be better spent on public housing and health” (which is a valid point). However, there was no thorough discussion about it. In my opinion, a reader that is not familiar with sports economics literature on public spending on stadiums is left with very little doubt, concluding that it is the right decision to invest public money in stadiums.

Besides this, I had the impression that after a very nice first half of the book, the author felt that he needed more “meat” in the book and therefore he added many unrelated essays. In my opinion, not only that these essays did not contribute to the book, but they also actually did more harm than good.

In these chapters, the author promotes hosting mega-events while emphasizing things like legacy and downsizing the vast evidence presented by sports economists about the negative aspects of hosting mega-events. For example, in Chapter 11, the author heavily criticizes the decision to cancel the 2026 Victoria Commonwealth Games because of too high expected costs. While he doubts the numbers presented (7 billion Australian dollars compared with the initial budget of 2-3 billion Australian dollars), he does not doubt things like legacy whose economic significance is very questionable (ask people in Athens, Rio, Cape Town and Kaliningrad about the economic burden of such a legacy). After all, there is a reason that we see a significant reduction in the number of cities that are ready to bid for hosting the Olympic Games. Again, the author goes for the minimum level by briefly mentioning concerns about hosting mega-events, but this is clearly not enough. I refer the interested reader to Zimbalist (2020) for evidence on the economic gamble behind hosting mega-events.

It is important to note that in Chapter 16, the author refers to the problem of overspending in the Olympic Games, but in my opinion, it is too little and too late. Because, for example, in Chapter 12, he speaks about the successful 2023 Women’s FIFA World Cup, and expectations regarding economic success. He mentions that one of the benefits of hosting mega events is the increase in tourism, however the evidence of such an increase is very limited. In fact, in most cases, the increase in tourism (if exists) is much smaller than anticipated (e.g., Mitchell & Stewart, 2015; Peeters et al., 2014). In any case, I wouldn’t refer to Chapters 15 and 16 as to economics of the Olympic Games, but rather as to “wishful thinking of the Olympic Games”.

To summarize, it is a pity that such a successful first half of the book was ruined by a desire to fill the space with unconvincing, unrelated, and sometimes simply sloppy writing in the second half of the book.[1]

Copyright © Alex Krumer 2025

Footnote

[1] For example, consistency is a symbol of professional writing. However, in Chapter 15, within one page, COVID-19 had several variations (COVID-19, covid, Covid-19). Another example of sloppiness is the mistake in Chapter 16 with the year of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, which is obviously 2022, not 2002 as was written in the book. These are just examples of bad writing and/or editing that negatively affect the overall impression.

References

Bradbury, J. C., Coates, D., & Humphreys, B. R. (2024). Public policy toward professional sports stadiums: A review. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 43(3), 899-937.

Kuper, S., & Szymanski, S. (2018). Soccernomics: Why England loses, why Germany and Brazil win, and why the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey–and even Iraq–are destined to become the kings of the world’s most popular sport. Hachette UK.

Mitchell, H., & Stewart, M. F. (2015). What should you pay to host a party? An economic analysis of hosting sports mega-events. Applied Economics, 47(15), 1550-1561.

Oyer, P. (2022). An economist goes to the game: how to throw away $580 million and other surprising insights from the economics of sports. Yale University Press.

Palacios-Huerta, I. (2014). Beautiful game theory: How soccer can help economics. Princeton University Press.

Peeters, T., Matheson, V., & Szymanski, S. (2014). Tourism and the 2010 World Cup: Lessons for developing countries. Journal of African Economies, 23(2), 290-320.

Zimbalist, A. (2020). Circus maximus: The economic gamble behind hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. Brookings Institution Press.