I attempted to write something based on my interests...
I am a member of the Ohio State Women’s Rugby Team. We recently made a trip to Iowa for the Midwest Tournament.
The location for this tournament is supposed to be centralized in the Midwest, so teams can have comparable travel costs and significant home advantages will be eliminated. The coach of the Iowa Women’s Rugby Team, and subsequently an influential power in Women’s Rugby, finagled his way into making the tournament location in Iowa.
Obviously, this greatly decreased his team’s fixed costs of travel and increased the Ohio State Team’s costs considerably. I took a Sports Economics class and this seemingly strategic location contradicted some of the principals I learned in the class. Although out of state teams suffered considerably more fixed costs, they escaped having to pay higher costs of field rentals, ref salaries, and hosting fees they would have incurred had the tournament been hosted in their home areas.
Although the Iowa Team suffered these costs that other travel teams did not, the coaches decision to host the tournament possibly contributed to Iowa success (they placed 2ns in the Midwest, while OSU placed 3rd). Evidence given in “Distance matters in away games: Evidence from the German Football League” supports this idea. The paper provides supporting evidence that as game location distance increases, traveling teams score less points.
Understandably, a home team advantage exists. However the costs incurred by the Iowa team (refs, fields, insurance, ect) would most probably be equal to or greater than traveling team fixed costs. Winning the tournament generates no revenue, leaving the Iowa team with little more than bragging rights and even more costs when they travel to the West Coast to compete for the National Title.
Overall, one could ascertain that the strategic “cost effective” decision of hosting the Midwest Tournament would incur far greater costs than fixed costs incurred by traveling teams. In effect, although the Iowa coach desired home team advantage, he ended up creating more costs for his team.
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I am looking forward to reading that paper on Distance in away games as soon as I have time to do so. Since I haven't read it yet I am not sure on exactly how distance matters but it made me think of the idea of giving a NFL franchise to London in the UK.
ReplyDeleteThis is an option I know the NFL has been looking into for a few years now. They have already played one game in London in each of the last three seasons. I was lucky enough to get to go to that game last year and it was fantastic so I see why the league would want to expand to Europe. A team in London would bring in a lot of revenue for the league but it would be quite interesting to see how the team itself will perform.
The team would have a tremendous home field advantage since all of its opponents would have to cross the Atlantic to play the team. On the other hand the team would be faced with the exact same problem when it travels to away games. Since each team plays an equal amount of home and away games this would even out for the London franchise but leave some teams at an advantage and others at a disadvantage.
In total 8 teams would have the advantage of playing the London team at home while 8 teams would have the disadvantage of playing the London team in London. This would with out a doubt have an effect on the playoffs and what teams get there. A team traveling to London that just missed the playoffs might point out that a team that got a home game against the London team just barely made the playoffs and the reason would be the London team. I sense that players would be the group that is most against a London franchise while the league might think it would be a good idea.
I can see why players and owners alike might object to traveling such a distance (US to London). However, I think that making these long distance away games more of a norm, might spawn a whole new culture of sports fanatic.
ReplyDeleteTake rugby for example. Professional teams from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and England have no choicebut to travel extreme distances to play one another. tThe rugby follwing is huge. People (like my coach for example) travel thousands of miles for a game. The US dosen't have quite the same enthusiam for a sport that drives us to travel such large distances under a united front of support.
If we start to regularly send NFL teams overseas, we might create a strong trans-continental football follwing. This could entice Americans to travel more, thus conteracting some of the hometeam advantage London football teams would have. Many economics benefits would follow; Air Travel companies would see revenue boots, advertising dollars would be spent to sway the traveling NFL fans, more merchandise, etc.
While the costs initially might outweigh the benefits, I think creating an international NFL football schedule might have huge rewards.