ABSTRACT
Much of the economics associated with sport are conventional. Yet in some respects, spectator sport has peculiar economics, as some clubs are more concerned with winning games than making profits. Another difference is that most manufacturers in the non-sport world sell the certainty of their output as being reliable, the uncertainty of the result is a bedrock of sport. Moreover, unlike in conventional business, firms and individuals in the sports industry need a competitor before a saleable product is available. In contrast to the European situation, sport in the United States is geared towards profit-maximisation, yet paradoxically, this has involved significant market intervention so that the American sports business system is the antithesis of the competitive capitalism on which the US economy has been built. The sports business does not operate in a political vacuum, and there have been three prevalent systems of sports financing. At one end there were the fully planned sports systems, which were state-run and state-financed. At the other was the United States, where sport is dominated by private enterprise, and in the middle lies the European model where most grassroots funding emanates from household and local authority spending with national governments aiding elite sport.
