The peculiar economics of football:

Competitive balance is crucial in professional sports. If one team excessively dominates a league, results become predictable and the league loses its appeal. On the other hand, few have investigated the effects of the Great Recession of 2008 on the football industry because many question to what extent the two are even connected. This paper investigates to what extent the wider macroeconomic ecosystem is connected to the football industry by studying how the Great Recession affected competitive balance in the Italian Serie A division. The results are not entirely conclusive because the variables used to measure the Recession, namely the unemployment rate and GDP per capita, did not always significantly affect competitive balance. Nevertheless, the results suggest that the crisis affected clubs differently; the bigger clubs have maintained their dominance while the smaller clubs have struggled to keep up with the leading pack.