Many of these contributions will be reviewed in their proper place later in this volume

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Since the appearance of the pioneering fifa 15 coins work of Rottenberg, Neale and Sloane, there has been a proliferation of published academic research on the economics of team sports, in the form of both journal articles and books. Many of these contributions will be reviewed in their proper place later in this volume. At this point, however, we shall highlight just a few of the main themes in the development of the economics of team sports lit- erature over the last three decades, by identifying a handful of journal articles that seem to us to have been particularly influential. The ideas that were originally developed in these articles will figure prominently, and will be considered in greater detail, throughout this volume.

While Rottenberg and Neale both adopted a discursive style for the presentation of their insights, an article by El-Hodiri and Quirk (1971) demonstrated that these and other ideas could also be represented and developed within a more formal, mathematical framework. The kind of model developed by El-Hodiri and Quirk is now the standard apparatus for analysing questions about the implications for competitive balance within a sports league of institutional or policy changes, such as the intro- duction of free agency, salary caps or revenue sharing arrangements.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, and with the benefit of hindsight after witnessing a number of attempts at introducing such changes by the North American sports governing bodies in the interim, Fort and Quirk (1995) and Vrooman (1995) provided a compelling demonstration of the usefulness of this framework for policy analysis in team sports.

Sports economists have often claimed that an abundance of easily accessible data on the characteristics and performance of individual per- sonnel makes professional team sports an ideal laboratory for the empiri- cal scrutiny of economic theories and hypotheses that might prove difficult to test elsewhere. An article by Scully (1974), which investigated the relationship between the performance of individual players in US Major League Baseball and their compensation, provides a classic example of a contribution of this kind. Scully’s motivation was to demon- strate that severe restrictions on the rights of the players to sell their ser- vices in the labour market (in the form of the reserve clause) led to exploitation perpetrated by the teams as employers, in the sense that indi- vidual players’ wages were systematically below their contributions to their teams’ revenue-earning capability. But the applicability of Scully’s methods and the relevance of his findings went much further than this. Identifying the links between pay, productivity and human capital is a task of central importance towards achieving a much broader understanding of how labour markets work, as well as insights into specific issues such as inequality and discrimination in opportunity and compensation.