Unified Korean team, unified CIS team, unified German team, Chinese Taipei… Precedents for non-states or unrecognised states taking part under the Olympic Flag.
And how do you propose a sports club profit from betting? It will tax the betting parlours?
Sounds bad. But at the same time if you look at it from the point of view of this local amateur team it is not like this stadium would have done much for them at all. Being amateurs they probably still could not charge admission even if they had a turnstile stadium. So it is not the case that this would have actually provided a boost to the club as a business. It sounds like the administration was interested in getting a construction project approved for reasons other than boosting local football.
I do not propose anything. I have only a passing interest in the financial aspects of football, and zero interest in other sports. But I can say what I would try to do if owned some football team and the state suddenly gave me the finger.
I’d use the already formed cartel of superior football leagues to negotiate e deal with the major betting parlors whereas they fix the results of the games to maximize their profit and we play along, and set a given share of returns to be disbursed to the teams playing the individual game.
If the cartel could be maintained (it’s not violating anyone’ property) without state assistance perhaps that would keep superior leagues running.
If sportsfans wouldn’t like fixed games, they are free to pay five time the ticket price to see a “spontaneous” game. Between the viability of the cartel and preferences, the market will sort this up. But it would certainly appear feasible on first sight.
And where would you find the people stupid enough to want to bet on your fixed games?
Well, the same argument could be made about casinos in general. If you had a decent probability of wining the Casino would go bankrupt. So, as long as it is standing, you have no decent probability. Why bother playing than? Even e 10-year old could get that, and yet people play. The reason is simple: gambling itself is utility-enhancing for many people, and they keep playing not to extract a net gain form the thing, but just for the fun of it. The very same could happen (and does happen from what I can tell) for most sports bets.
And than again, even assuming that away, how can you know on whom did most people bet? How can you be sure that your own bet was in a small minority or a majority? For if you bet against the tide, there are good chances that you’ll win in a fixed game. Of course bets are multi-dimensional (you bet on many things to happen in the same game) and this line of thought is simplistic, but the general idea holds, that even if you know games are fixed, you still have a chance of wining. A much better chance than at a poker hand, I’d say.
And finally, games are fixed nowadays and betting is still as good as ever. To name just an example, in the European Cup of 2004 the winner was…. Now Greece isn’t exactly the coolest team around (even we beat them in their very first “post-champion” match), especially since titans such as Portugal, England, the Netherlands, Spain and those sissies of Italy where competing. No one (with the possible exception of Greeks) really believed that the Greeks had won in a fair game, and yet by the time the next European Cup was held betting increased. So, people are more than happy to just go for it…somehow.
Why would a person who can chose between betting on a fixed match and on a non-fixed match decide to bet on the fixed one?
A good question indeed. Well, perhaps because there would be no unfixed matches to bet uppon at all, besides high school playthings. If indeed the non-betting public is unwilling to bear the higher cost of the ticket of an unfixed game, no such games would be held at all (there is, by definition, no way to transfer betting income to non-fixed games without slowly transforming them into fixed games). So, depending on market data at the time, non-fixed games could succumb to the competition of fixed ones, leaving no opportunity to bet but in fixed games.
I belive that, in the real world, this would depend on the region at hand. As already suggested, major European leagues (British, Italian, Spanish and Dutch) would survive as betting cartels, with the rest morphing into “ticket revenue” leagues. Of course, the former would be much more profitable and many teams would try to enter such cartels. So, their long-run viability s questionable.
This is stupid. Cartels of match-fixing clubs would be both less able to sell tickets and less able to get people to bet on their matches but somehow they would be more profitable than real sport.
Your fake sport model exists already. It is called WWE wrestling. It has nowhere near the spectator appeal football does and there is so little interest on betting on it that it is not even offered as an event you can bet on by any of the online betting shops.
Premier League has an annual attendance of over 13 million but somehow this giant windfall is not enough and would need to be supplemented by two bit match fixing. Do you know betting is not taxed in England? It isn’t being used to subsidise anyone. The clubs are doing just fine without a tax on betting gains and without a state subsidy so somehow I don’t think their choice would be between adopting your brilliant model or folding. Last time I checked professional sport existed for long before the state got around to subsidising it and it had nothing to do with any match fixing.
You make good arguments in you typical irritating tone, wholly unneeded since we’re just exchanging our fantasy “what if” views. Please, do try and learn to behave yourself.
As for the question at hand, sure I can’t ‘prove’ that that would work (nor would I have any interest in doing so) any more than any business plan could be preemptively “proved”. All I’m saying is that perhaps it could work. Yet I would insist on you not going around too secure that pre-subsidy professional sport had nothing to do with fixing. I would certainly hold that pristine view in serious doubt.
Just a quick thing: Professional Wrestling matches have been fixed since time immemorial, yet people are still willingly buying tickets and paying for TV events. Not all wrestling organizations are as big and successful as the WWE empire or the All Japan Pro Wrestling federation but they manage to get by without betting or begging for alms. It’s just a different business model. Don King made a fortune by pitting incredibly strong boxers against people who had no serious chance of winning: people willingly paid money to see Mike Tyson beat the living daylight out of people who didn’t stand a chance against him. The model may seem questionable but it works. In XVII century England people paid money and bet on pretty much any event: cock fighting, women trying to gouge each other’s eyes off, badger baiting… they even bet on how many rats a terrier could kill in a given time. Again, the model may be questionable or even repugnant by our standards but it worked.
It’s just a question of different business models to adapt to different markets.
Finally my area of expertise pops up on Mises! You’re only partially correct here. Since 2001 the consumer is no longer taxed on their stakes or winnings, but the betting operators do have to pay a special levy of 20% of all gross stakes on horse racing to the government to be doled out to the racing industry. There’s controversy arising now as the bookmakers are moving their online betting operations to the island of Gibraltar to subvert this levy.
The big thing here is that the UK has fixed-odds betting on everything with no direct tax to the consumer. Most European countries only allow some quasi-state operation to take pari-mutuel bets, that is a giant pool system where the true odds are not known until the cash is divided up (less the government’s cut, of course).
I don’t know how one could propose fixing matches with a fixed-odds betting system. The minute word got out about the eventual outcome everybody would flock to back it- this has happened a few times in lower league games at the end of the season when teams have nothing to play for and weird results like 4-4 draws crop up. In lieu of these occurrences the bookies will usually hold all payments until the FA or whoever does an investigation.
Fixing is not in the interest of the industry as a whole. We want people betting as much as possible with as much to win as possible in their minds at all times. With fixed-odds it’s the long-term that counts because the way the books get balanced the over-rounds always guarantee a profit regardless of the eventual outcome so long as lots of people are betting all the time.
My former company was still making over 100 million pounds in profit in the middle of the recession. It’s a far cry from the glory days of 2007 when profits were over 300 million, but the take is still very good for the times and for an incredibly competitive industry.
Betting exchanges with consumers matching their odds directly against each other are the wave of the future, but I will leave this for another time… [8-|]
The infamous “irregular betting patterns”. The amount of money you could extract is severely limited anyway. If you on a betting exchange just dump a million pounds on X team winning then you are going to collapse the odds. And betting parlours in reality also just being intermediaries between bettors aren’t going to accept a multi million bet at the quoted odds either. This would leave them with a huge liability when how they operate is that they aim to be covered on both sides.
Yes, but cock fighting is not fixed. If it were nobody would bet on it. They would find something else.
Even today you can bet on outcome of elections, on whether USA is going to attack Iran, on whether they are going to capture Osama bin Laden…
I can tell you this, “sports” would be way more badass without government intervention:
(Just ignore the audio)
bookies do not need to fix the results in order to make money, they would make much more money in the long term if everybody believed the games were legit.
Sport in a free society. That is a very interesting topic especially for me. I feel like most liberty minded folk, are either apathetic towards sports or are anti-sports. Not me, I love sports, almost all sports. Yes, I could do without the nationalism, but I love watching the skill on display, the drama, etc.
I think professional sports would continue to survive, but they would have to change. No more subsidies from the government to build stadiums (but the price to build stadiums would probably go down as well), and it might become more difficult to raise big money from tv contracts without the government (although I am not exactly sure how that would work, because there would be a strong incentive for them to try and ‘protect’ their tv product (maybe a PPV format or giving exclusive live broadcast rights to movie theatres, who knows))
Its also impossible to tell what would happen to the structure of leagues, especially without any borders. Maybe it would become more of an exhibition, local league, and invitational tournament structure, instead of national leagues and continental tournaments.
What is really irritating is people making a matter of fact statements about things they simply don’t know. You are making it your modus operandi. You say that you have only a passing interest in financial aspects of football, but then you feel yourself qualified to pooh-pooh our discussing of TV rights and tickets in a topic you opened yourself and asked us for our views!
Somebody had to show you that while you may have a passing interest in financial aspects of football you don’t have any actual understanding of it.
I suggest you run a test game of Football Manager 2010 with a Prem club and after a while take a look at the financial tab and see the giant income from TV rights and tickets. It is not necessarily the most sophisticated way to learn but from your starting point it won’t fail to do you good.
but weren’t those events sponsored by the government?
[:D]
Yeah, but Vick’s dog fights weren’t, and neither were the “Bum Fights” series. It’s not much of a leap, really.
Hopefully it would be multi-tiered continental leagues.
but weren’t most/all gladiators slaves? I would imagine it would be very difficult to find voluntary gladiators.