Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports
ISBN: 9780691187945
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Professional sports -- Economic aspects -- United States;

Books examining the financial aspects of American sports have proliferated recently, but none offers the range and depth of this first volume in a projected two-volume study. Quirk, a retired economics professor at Cal Tech, and Fort, an associate professor of economics at Washington State University, cover professional baseball, football, basketball and hockey in their definitive study. They examine the prices and values of sports franchises; the tax shelters developed by owners; the real and imaginary worth of stadiums and arenas, both publicly and privately owned; the reserve clause, designed to limit players' mobility; the increasing inequity of players' salaries; the attempts to secure and retain competitive balance in various leagues with a view to the maximization of profits; and the establishment of rival leagues (``a very risky business''). In every chapter the authors document their arguments with copious statistics. General readers may find the text more technical than they would like, but this is certainly important reading for anyone engaged in sports at any level. Illustrations. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

James Quirk is retired Professor of Economics at California Institute of Technology. He is a widely recognized expert on the economics of sports, and is the author of Minnesota Football: The Golden Years, 1932-1941 . Rodney D. Fort is Associate Professor of Economics at Washington State University. He has written for numerous sports publications, and is the President of the Local Youth Baseball Association.

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