The past week’s Freakonomics podcast was about the “longshot” Leicester win of the English Premier League. If you really want to understand how big a surprise this was, as well as good discussions of relegation, and sports gambling, you could do worse than listening to the podcast.
Especially interesting were the points raised about how American leagues use the concept of parity keeping interest high in a sport because no one wants to watch sports where too many teams aren’t competitive, and how the most popular leagues in the world are outside the US. (Also, how college sports are much more like European leagues, in that the big schools have fairly few constraints on simply gathering up all the best players, and yet they are still very popular as well.)
Just go listen, and think some more about how American sports leagues are run by their ownership groups. There’s a lot to consider that many in the US don’t usually think about.
Leave a Reply