|
on Sports and Economics |
| By: | Jan van Ours (Erasmus University Rotterdam) |
| Abstract: | If the economic performance of a firm is disappointing, the manager may be replaced. Whether that improves performance is unclear. For regular firms, it is often difficult to study the causes and consequences of managerial replacement due to limited data availability. This is different for sports clubs, where high-quality data are available on a regular basis. The current paper studies managerial replacements in professional football in the Netherlands. Disappointment is measured by two indicators that use bookmaker expectations as a reference. Points surprise is based on actual results, while performance surprise is based on expected goals. The analysis shows that within-season managerial replacements are more likely when there is disappointment, that is, when both surprise indicators are negative. Match results improve after managerial replacement. However, this improvement is not causal: a counterfactual analysis suggests that match results would have improved even in the absence of managerial replacement. |
| JEL: | C20 L83 M12 Z20 |
| Date: | 2026–08–18 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20260059 |
| By: | Paul Gompers; George Hu; Will Levinson; Sachin Srivastava |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how networks formed through college athletics influence the early-career trajectories of Ivy League graduates. Tracking professional histories of 120, 306 Ivy League graduates, we compare each graduate's actual first job against other potential jobs that the graduate could reasonably have taken. Athletics-based networks, especially team-based connections, materially influence initial job choice. Employing one additional alum from a specific Ivy League collegiate sports team increases the probability that a same-team athlete joins the firm by 193.70% relative to the baseline match probability. Likewise, employing one more Ivy League alum who played a specific Varsity sport increases the probability that any Ivy League athlete who plays the same sport joins the firm by 16.40%, while employing one more alum who played any sport at a specific Ivy League university raises the probability that any Ivy League athlete from the same university joins the firm by 4.60%. For team-based connections, these effects persist whether the alum and the college athlete were direct peers whose college years overlapped or older “network” affiliates whose college years were completely disjoint. Our results demonstrate that college athletics-based social networks materially influence initial job placement and early-career trajectories for top college graduates. More generally, they clarify how non-academic social capital shapes the job searching and matching process within labor markets. |
| JEL: | I23 J24 J38 J4 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35527 |
| By: | Andy Chung (University of Reading, Global Labor Organization); Tin Cheuk Leung (Wake Forest University); James Reade (University of Reading) |
| Abstract: | Digital platforms expose workers and managers to immediate, public, and persistent evaluations from external audiences, creating a form of social pressure that may shape workplace decisions. We examine whether such digital social pressure predicts subsequent opportunity allocation and worker performance, using professional football as a high-frequency empirical setting. We link player-match data from Europe’s five major leagues to post-match Twitter commentary and construct measures of negative sentiment, toxicity, and racial abuse. Comparing players with themselves over time and teammates in the same current match, we find that greater negative sentiment is associated with a lower probability of appearing in the team’s next match. Toxicity shows a similar but less stable association, while racial-abuse intensity is imprecisely estimated when the measures enter jointly. By contrast, associations with performance conditional on a subsequent appearance are small and imprecise. Overall, the findings suggest that digital social pressure is reflected more strongly in the allocation of subsequent opportunities than in worker performance, showing how public evaluations generated outside formal organizational boundaries can become part of the reputational environment surrounding internal managerial decisions. |
| Keywords: | digital social pressure; online criticism; managerial decision-making; worker performance; social media; professional football; racial abuse |
| JEL: | J24 M54 D91 Z22 J71 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:wfuewp:023574 |
| By: | B. Moyo (University of South Africa); T. Gwatidzo (University of the Witwatersrand) |
| Abstract: | The announcement that South Africa would host the 2010 FIFA World Cup in 2004 was a triumphant moment for the country and the African continent at large. It marked the first time in FIFA's history that an African country would host the World Cup. In this study, we use the synthetic control method to create a counterfactual South Africa without the World Cup and compare it with the actual South Africa to analyse the impact of this tournament. Our results show that, although hosting the World Cup games in 2010 had no positive impact on GDP, it significantly increased tourism inflows. We, however, found evidence that GDP did increase from the announcement of South Africa hosting the tournament to one year before the event. This suggests that the analysis of these events should focus on both the year of the event and the period immediately after the host announcement. |
| Keywords: | FIFA World Cup, South Africa, GDP, Tourism, Synthetic Control Method |
| JEL: | L83 O11 O55 O47 C31 C33 E23 |
| Date: | 2025–12–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:afa:wpaper:wp032025 |
| By: | Perst, Florian; Schubart, Constantin; Welsch, Valeria |
| Abstract: | Social media has fundamentally changed how brands communicate and are perceived by consumers, increasing the importance of authenticity and credibility in brand communication. This study examines how social media campaigns by OKTAGON MMA Germany are associated with perceived authenticity, credibility, and brand perception, and whether differences exist between MMA fans and individuals with a general interest in sports. A quantitative online survey with 181 participants was conducted and analyzed using statistical methods. The results show that perceived authenticity has a strong positive association with both credibility and overall brand perception. Contrary to common assumptions, perceived advertising does not negatively affect authenticity or credibility but shows a weak positive relationship with brand evaluation. Furthermore, no significant differences between the analyzed content formats were found regarding perceived authenticity. The group comparison reveals that MMA fans evaluate the content significantly more positively across all examined dimensions than individuals with a general interest in sports. The findings contribute to a better understanding of authenticity, credibility, and brand perception in the context of professional sports social media communication and highlight the importance of integrating commercial elements in a credible and context-appropriate way. For practitioners, the results emphasize the need to balance strategic communication with perceived authenticity in order to strengthen brand perception in digital sports environments. |
| Keywords: | Brand Authenticity, Source Credibility, Social Media Communication, Digital Marketing, Sports Marketing, Advertising Effects |
| JEL: | M31 M37 L83 Z21 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:iubhbm:342562 |
| By: | Jakobsson, Niklas; Moore, Kristjan; Barbarioli, Bruno; Brodeur, Abel |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:307 |
| By: | Zitian Wang; Istiak Ahmed; Patarasate Unjitwattana; Emily Yunxi Xie; Meng-Jhang Fong; Po-Hsuan Lin |
| Abstract: | How level-0 players behave and how they are perceived by higher-level players are central questions in the literature on level-k models of boundedly rational strategic reasoning. To study these twin questions, we apply the intra-team communication method developed by Burchardi and Penczynski (2014) to identify level-0 actions and beliefs in the canonical beauty contest game and in a variant of the 11-20 game of Goeree et al. (2018), in which behavior appears inconsistent with the standard level-k model. In the beauty contest game, we replicate Burchardi and Penczynski (2014)'s finding that elicited level-0 beliefs align with observed level-0 actions. In the variant of the 11-20 game, however, elicited level-0 beliefs and observed level-0 actions diverge, and both depart from the standard level-0 assumption, suggesting a complementary explanation for the behavioral pattern documented by Goeree et al. (2018). |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.18069 |
| By: | Xiao, Leon Y. (IT University of Copenhagen); Deery, Callum; Lo, Ching Yiu; Xiaoyao, Ren; Huang, Yuchen; Tattan-Birch, Harry (UCL) |
| Abstract: | Background and aims: Restricting gambling advertising from targeting young people based on their age may reduce exposure and harm. In the United Kingdom (UK), voluntary self-regulation of the gambling industry body, the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC), requires its members’ social media adverts to exclude people aged under 25 years from being targeted, whereas the Netherlands legally prohibits gambling adverts from targeting people aged under 24 years. We assessed and compared compliance with these restrictions. Design: Cross-sectional analysis of advert-level data from the Meta Ad Library. Setting: Meta social media platforms (e.g., Instagram) in the UK and the Netherlands. Cases: 20, 119 UK adverts published by 61 BGC members’ advertising accounts and 13, 410 Dutch adverts published by 26 licensed gambling operators, last shown between 21 July 2025 and 21 May 2026 (inclusive). Measurements: An advert was classified as suspected non-compliant when its advertiser-set minimum targeted age was below 25 in the UK or below 24 in the Netherlands. Findings: In the UK, 31.3% (95% confidence interval [CI]=30.7%–32.0%) of adverts were suspected to have failed to comply with the age-based targeting restriction, compared with 1.1% (95% CI=1.0%–1.3%) in the Netherlands (risk ratio=28.0, 95% CI=23.9–32.9). Only 26.2% of UK advertising accounts was consistently compliant with every advert they published, compared to 65.4% of Dutch accounts. Indeed, all Dutch accounts (100%) complied at least once, whilst 18.0% of UK accounts never complied even once. Conclusions: Gambling adverts on social media were 28 times as likely to breach restrictions on targeting young adults under voluntary UK industry self-regulation than under the Dutch legal prohibition. Legal restrictions backed by substantial financial penalties may therefore be critical to securing compliance with measures designed to protect against gambling harms. |
| Date: | 2026–08–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:lawarc:sbdfk_v2 |