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Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics
The first book to use the world's most popular sport to test economic theories and document novel human behaviorA wealth of research in recent decades has seen the economic approach to human behavior extended over many areas previously considered to belong to sociology, political science, law, and other fields. Research has also shown that economics can provide insight into many aspects of sports, including soccer. Beautiful Game Theory is the first book that uses soccer to test economic theories and document novel human behavior.In this brilliant and entertaining book, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta illuminates economics through the world's most popular sport. He offers unique and often startling insights into game theory and microeconomics, covering topics such as mixed strategies, discrimination, incentives, and human preferences. He also looks at finance, experimental economics, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. Soccer provides rich data sets and environments that shed light on universal economic principles in interesting and useful ways.Essential reading for students, researchers, and sports enthusiasts, Beautiful Game Theory is the first book to show what soccer can do for economics.
224 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 22, 2015
Most soccer-and-economics books focus on a single direction of the relationship between both areas: using formal economic methods to explain patterns and behaviors on professional football. This book treats that relationship as a two-way street, also pointing out situations in which association football can be used to evaluate economical theses.
Written by a professor of Management who also happens to be the Head of Talent Identification for Athletic Bilbao's legendary player formation system, the book shows strong knowledge on both domains. While some chapters show biases common in econometric studies (such as the excessive attention dedicated to statistical significance as opposed to actual measures of relevance), Beautiful Game Theory is still an academically serious and worthwhile read.
Written by a professor of Management who also happens to be the Head of Talent Identification for Athletic Bilbao's legendary player formation system, the book shows strong knowledge on both domains. While some chapters show biases common in econometric studies (such as the excessive attention dedicated to statistical significance as opposed to actual measures of relevance), Beautiful Game Theory is still an academically serious and worthwhile read.
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December 3, 2015Gives such anew and fresh perspective to the beautiful game. For all football and game theory fanatics.
May 22, 2020
Great book, which explains some theorems with soccer. I still didn't understand all of them, but it is a good take into economic behavior. We can learn a lot by examining penalty kicks, referee's prefefrences and ticket sales.
March 2, 2020
I really appreciate the approaches used to test the theory using football data. Also enjoy the style of writing of the author, together with the passion he has for both economics and football.
November 13, 2022
Good treatment on how analysing football can helpnfurther economics.
Fun case studies and anecdotes, but I scipped most sections on statistics, methodology and tables full of results.
Fun case studies and anecdotes, but I scipped most sections on statistics, methodology and tables full of results.
March 25, 2015
This book was a birthday present from my colleagues, who really know me very well! It's something a bit different from the usual. There has been plenty of work using the tools of economics to illuminate what's going on in the world of football (in fact, one of the best-attended sessions I went to in last year's Royal Economic Society Conference was devoted to using economics to figure out what the impact of Financial Fair Play would be). This is, as the subtitle suggests, the opposite. Palacios Huerta's work uses data from football to test economic theories, many of which are otherwise really tricky to fully test in the real world.
Penalties are particularly useful to him. Their formal, ritualised nature, with well-defined and understood pay-offs, allow him to test quite a few different theories. My favourite was how he used them to test whether psychological pressure affects performance in competitive environments (the key element here is who kicks first in a penalty shoot-out, which is randomly determined by tossing a coin). The author suggests a couple of ways to minimise the advantage he finds goes to the team that gets to kick first, and I really think FIFA should be looking at those.
Another example I particularly liked: How to test the efficient market hypothesis (basically, that the market incorporates any new public information fully and so immediately that no one can take advantage of it to make money, say, trading stocks)? Palacios Huerta's answer is to use the existence of half time, a period when no new information is emerging, and examine how betting markets react. He looks particularly at a situation when there has been a goal right before the interval, therefore providing a significant shock of information.
The book is basically a collection of papers, many adapted from papers already published. I was expecting a pop science-type book, a sort of Football Freakonomics, if you will, but it was quite a bit more technical than that. If Palacios Huerta simplified the papers, he did so only mildly. You get a good level of detail about his exact models, with equations and econometric results aplenty. This makes it ideal for a football fan with a good knowledge of economics. From what I could tell, though, anyone not comfortable with getting into the detailed economics could just skip the most technical bits and still get a very good understanding of the intuitions and results.
If you like football, I'd recommend this.
MY GRADE: A B.
Penalties are particularly useful to him. Their formal, ritualised nature, with well-defined and understood pay-offs, allow him to test quite a few different theories. My favourite was how he used them to test whether psychological pressure affects performance in competitive environments (the key element here is who kicks first in a penalty shoot-out, which is randomly determined by tossing a coin). The author suggests a couple of ways to minimise the advantage he finds goes to the team that gets to kick first, and I really think FIFA should be looking at those.
Another example I particularly liked: How to test the efficient market hypothesis (basically, that the market incorporates any new public information fully and so immediately that no one can take advantage of it to make money, say, trading stocks)? Palacios Huerta's answer is to use the existence of half time, a period when no new information is emerging, and examine how betting markets react. He looks particularly at a situation when there has been a goal right before the interval, therefore providing a significant shock of information.
The book is basically a collection of papers, many adapted from papers already published. I was expecting a pop science-type book, a sort of Football Freakonomics, if you will, but it was quite a bit more technical than that. If Palacios Huerta simplified the papers, he did so only mildly. You get a good level of detail about his exact models, with equations and econometric results aplenty. This makes it ideal for a football fan with a good knowledge of economics. From what I could tell, though, anyone not comfortable with getting into the detailed economics could just skip the most technical bits and still get a very good understanding of the intuitions and results.
If you like football, I'd recommend this.
MY GRADE: A B.
March 20, 2025
Finally, a book that confirms what every football fan already suspects—there’s logic behind the chaos, even if your team refuses to acknowledge it. Palacios-Huerta applies game theory to everything from penalty shootouts to why some clubs consistently outperform their budget, proving that football isn’t just passion and vibes—it’s strategy, probability, and occasionally, a complete disregard for both.
October 4, 2015
Que l'on ne se trompe pas, c'est un manuel d'économie - qui nécessite des bases dans cette matière - où les hypothèses sont vérifiées par le foot. Les économistes y trouveront leur bonheur par la très grande qualité du travail économique. Les amateurs de football resteront sur leur faim.
January 20, 2016
If you like soccer and economics, put this one on your must-read list
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews