The labour markets of professional sports:performance, employment & discrimination

The sports industry is regarded as an exceptional setting to analyse economic theories and phenomena, because of the availability of data on wages, employment history and productivity measures over a long period of time (Kahn, 2000). Research in sports economics is crucial to understand the potential impacts of introducing policies and regulations in sports leagues. For example, issues such wage gaps because of skill differences, labour market discrimination, job search and match theory and the incentives for corruption can all be analysed using the sports industry.I intend to address a number of important questions in this proposal, and also look to explore issues that are becoming increasingly important in modern day sports. First, the extent to which transfer fees and player salaries have increased in the last few years alone is startling. From an economic perspective, we would expect that highly skilled professionals should be paid higher salaries and should be sorted into the most successful clubs. Second, there is a current lively debate regarding the lack of progress in ensuring equal opportunities are given to players and coaches from ethnic minorities in football. While other sports have had some deal of success in addressing this issue, such as American football, European football has been criticised for its lack of attention to this issue.