University of Chicago economist Allen R. Sanderson looks into an issue that the LR found intriguing last month:
Throughout the entire 2+ hour ordeal, I kept asking myself: Why would anyone waste good time or money watching this sport? Ignoring for a moment the lack of scoring, the ubiquitous flops that would make an NBA player jealous or incredulous, and “unnatural acts” such as not being able to touch the ball with your hands or arms, I began to apply basic economic principles to the sport, and tried to understand why 6 billion people, including my graduate teaching assistants from Milan, Rio and Barcelona, seem to care passionately and a few hundred million, mainly in the United States, don’t.
Like Watching Paint Dry
In our society and our sports, most Americans like to see some relationship between effort and reward. In labor and product markets, we appreciate competitive market forces and incentives that reward ability, hard work and ingenuity. The same is true for the sports we participate in and follow as spectators. While we can appreciate the grace, artistry or skill associated with, say, figure skating or soccer, we like it best when someone keeps score. And we like the scoring to have some measure of justice or rationality to it. …
In contrast [to baseball, football, and basketball], when a soccer team has the ball, the chance it will score on that possession is effectively 0.001. Over 90 minutes (the length of a game), there are hundreds of changes of possession with no change on the scoreboard. A team can dominate the game, control the ball beautifully, pass with tremendous ?lan, out-play the other team and still not score. … [O]ver the course of 90 minutes in a decidedly low-scoring affair, a referee’s call or a 30-second burst by an arguably weaker opponent means something akin to a fluke can determine who advances.
Well, ATSRTWT. I chose that passage to quote because it hits on many of the same criticisms as my first contribution to the debate, a post derided hereabouts by Michael Sanera as “soccer bigotry.”
HT: DivisionofLabour.com.
