| Abstract: |
The point of departure in this paper is the diagnosis of Hoehn and Szymanski
(1999) that the interlocking system of European football creates an unbalanced
system. To secure competitive balance at both the European and the national
level, they recommend to reform European football into a closed superleague
American-style. In this paper I argue for a radically different route. Instead
of giving up dominant traditions of European football, like
promotion-relegation and the interlocking system, it is possible to maintain
the defining characteristics of European football by returning to the state of
affairs in the 1950s, before the commercialisation of football through the
media started. This requires the free of charge distribution of football
matches on TV, which can be justified by standard economic welfare analysis. |