Sharing the Revenues from Broadcasting Sport Events

We study the problem of sharing the revenues from broadcasting sport league events among participating teams. We provide direct, axiomatic, and game-theoretical foundations for two focal rules: the equal-split rule and concede-and-divide. The former allocates the revenues generated from broadcasting each game equally among the participating teams in the game. The latter concedes each team the revenues from its fan base and divides equally the residual. We also provide an application studying the case of sharing the revenue from broadcasting games in La Liga, the Spanish Football League. We show that hybrid schemes, combining our rules with lower bounds and performance measures, yield close outcomes to the current allocation being implemented by the Spanish National Professional Football League Association.

This paper was accepted by Manel Baucells, decision analysis.