Research on Football

Fans of football research or even just of football may be interested to know that the April issue of the Journal of Economic Psychology [ vol 31, no. 2] is devoted to the economics of football. There are lots of interesting articles in it on such topics as the advantage gained by home teams, the pricing of World Cup tickets and the effect of talent disparity on team productivity.
Details of one of the papers is below:

National well-being and international sports events
Georgios Kavetsos, Stefan Szymanski

The widely proclaimed economic benefits of hosting major sporting events have received substantial criticism by academic economists and have been shown to be negligible, at best. The aim of this paper is to formally examine the existence of another potential impact: national well-being or the so-called “feelgood” factor. Using data on self-reported life satisfaction for twelve European countries we test for the impact of hosting and of national athletic success on happiness. Our data covers three different major events: the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship. We find that the “feelgood” factor associated with hosting football events is large and significant, but that the impact of national athletic success on happiness, while correctly signed, is statistically insignificant.

The current crisis in Ireland: will we get a replay?

This paper reports experimental results on how to predict football results, a talent we could have done with recently.
Dijksterhuis A, Bos MW, van der Leij A, & van Baaren RB (2009). Predicting Soccer Matches After Unconscious and Conscious Thought as a Function of Expertise. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19818044