Publications by PSE researchers

L’idée d’un championnat regroupant les plus grands clubs européens n’est pas nouvelle. Décryptage de l’économie du soccer aux États-Unis et perspectives pour le football européen.

Les revendications des footballeuses, notamment les joueuses américaines de « soccer », sur l’égalité de traitement avec les footballeurs, n’ont été satisfaites qu’au niveau des équipes nationales. L’équation Equal play, equal pay dans les championnats est loin d’être aussi simple à résoudre et, malgré des raisons liées à l’histoire du football féminin, s’explique aussi par son économie.

Sport professionnel européen le plus développé financièrement parlant, le football n’en reste pas moins un secteur où il demeure particulièrement complexe d’appliquer les méthodologies d’analyses de l’économie traditionnelle.

One of the world’s most legendary derbies, based on a politico-religious rivalry, is the match between Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow. However, the first matches at the end of the 19 th century were above all popular and commercial successes, hence the name “The Old Firm”, symbolising the shared financial interests of the two clubs in the Scottish capital. It wasn’t until some twenty years later, in the 1910s, that the antagonism really came to the fore : Green vs. Blue, Catholic vs. Protestant, Republican vs. Unionist. Even though “The Old Firm” has lost some of its European lustre, both in sporting and economic terms, it remains a popular success that generates substantial income on match days. The rivalry, still essential to this success, has also changed in nature : as society has become less religious, “The Old Firm” has become its own generator of “sectarianism”.

The fact that home football teams win more games than away teams has been largely discussed in the literature. Crowd factors appear to be the most dominant cause of this home advantage . At the end of the 2019–2020 season, the COVID-19 pandemic forced European football teams to close their stadium to fans, allowing researchers to exploit this natural experiment to analyze the effects of crowd on match outcomes and referees' decisions. To answer to this question, we used match data played in the top two divisions of four of the main national professional leagues in European countries and Portugal in the 2018–19 and the 2019–20 seasons. We find that the total absence of a generally supportive crowd has a significant effect on home advantage. This results in a reduction of the chances of a home win, a poorer performance by the home team's players, and more severe refereeing decisions toward the home team and less severe toward the away team.

Dans le football, la multipropriété de clubs (en anglais multi-club ownership – MCO) concerne aussi bien des propriétaires individuels, des groupes ou des clubs. C’est un phénomène plutôt récent qui date de la fin des années 1990, mais qui semble prendre de l’ampleur dans le football aujourd’hui. Économiquement, cette évolution de la MCO s’inscrit dans une logique de fusions-acquisitions d’entreprises qui est une pratique courante dans une économie de marché. Elles peuvent alors être « horizontales » (rachat de clubs de même niveau), « verticales » (rachat de clubs formateurs), ou encore viser une « extension du marché » (rachat de clubs d’autres régions). D’un point de vue sportif, cette pratique pose des problèmes évidents de conflit d’intérêts, si deux équipes d’une MCO sont amenées à se rencontrer dans une même compétition. L’UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) a (pour l’instant) réglé ces problèmes d’éthique sportive avec la jurisprudence Red Bull basée sur son concept d’« influence décisive » d’un club sur un autre. Classification JEL :

The significant gains in life expectancy at advanced ages that have been recorded over recent decades, combined with the arrival of the baby boom generations at old age, suggest a rapid growth in the costs of long-term care. This perspective fuels debates on the most suitable method for financing the loss of autonomy: in the absence of sufficiently broad insurance coverage and given the difficulty of evaluating both the probability of becoming dependent and the attendant costs, the risk is high that households will not save enough. This article addresses the issue: by drawing on data from the 2020 wave of the Pat€r survey, we evaluate to what extent households adapt their savings effort in function of their estimation of the probability that they will lose their autonomy on the medical level. To this end, we estimate household assets according to their own assessment of the risk of becoming dependent one day, controlling notably for their self-reported health status. To account for the possible endogeneity of expected dependency risk on household savings (people save less if their health is poor), we use instrumental variable estimation methods. Our results confirm that people with a higher self-assessment of the risk of becoming dependent accumulate more assets: measured at the average self-assessed risk, an increase of this risk by one standard deviation is associated with an increase in overall gross wealth of three to eight months of permanent income.

We study the impact of the policy of sending policyholders personalised information regarding their pension, which was introduced by the 2003 reform (the right to information, Droit à l’information – DAI), on improving their knowledge of their pension entitlements and on the changes in their level of concern regarding their future pension amount. By using data from the 2012 and 2020 waves of the PAT€R survey, we show that knowledge of pension entitlements improved and that concern regarding pension amounts fell between 2012 and 2020. The impact of sending information as part of the DAI is difficult to isolate from the impact of the change in the general context between 2012 and 2020. However, the results obtained suggest that the first documents sent under the DAI policy have a slight positive effect on knowledge and an indirect impact on reducing concern by improving knowledge.

How can we explain economically the shift from the people’s game to the global game? Why Manchester City, for example, whose origins lie in parochial paternalism at St Mark’s, can today adopt a strategy of global football domination through the City Football Group? The answer to these questions is, of course, multifaceted and based on a non-linear history. Football was very popular from its origins until the 1950s and 1960s. The beautiful game then entered its “dark” period for various reasons: recession in the 1980s, obsolescence of the stadiums, hooliganism, among others. The “renaissance” from the 1990s onwards was driven in particular by the creation of the Premier League, the very strong growth in TV rights and the globalization of English football.