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Thread about how public debate can be dramatically shaped based not on the quality of argument, but the credibility of the arguer...
There’s an interesting piece in The Athletic today about calls to scrap transfer fees. A leading voice quoted is Prof. Stefan Szymanski.
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There’s an interesting piece in The Athletic today about calls to scrap transfer fees. A leading voice quoted is Prof. Stefan Szymanski.
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Szymanski, of course, co-wrote the ground-breaking Socccernomics. He was the first football economist with a public profile and remains the best-known. In The Athletic piece, Szymanski presents scrapping transfer fees as, in essence, a simple case of worker rights.
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Soccernomics is a good read and deserves its reputation as a landmark in football analysis. But I wonder if there’s a danger of people accepting what Szymanski says is true about transfer fees not because he’s made the argument well, but because they liked his book.
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If you want to understand Szymanski’s argument in detail, you can read a paper he wrote on the subject for Fifpro, the global players’ union, in 2015. There’s a link below, because it’s no longer on the Fifpro site, where it was originally housed. https://theuglygame.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/stefan-szymanski-transfer-system-analysis.pdf
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I am not saying transfer fees are right or wrong. All I’m saying is that, before you come to a decision, you should read the reasoning of Szymanski. It’s only 20 pages, it won’t take long.
https://theuglygame.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/stefan-szymanski-transfer-system-analysis.pdf
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https://theuglygame.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/stefan-szymanski-transfer-system-analysis.pdf
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At the end of it, I don’t know if you will agree if transfer fees are good or bad. But here’s what I would bet: that you would be *amazed* at how thin the case advanced against them is, how little consideration of the knock-on effects there is.
https://theuglygame.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/stefan-szymanski-transfer-system-analysis.pdf
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https://theuglygame.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/stefan-szymanski-transfer-system-analysis.pdf
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I am not an economist, but I was surprised at how flimsy I found it – and how, rather than an argument for workers’ rights, it reads like a free-marketer’s call to abolish any barrier to capital doing what it wants. I wrote a review of the paper here:
https://theuglygame.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/the-fifpro-report-on-ending-transfer-fees-a-review/
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https://theuglygame.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/the-fifpro-report-on-ending-transfer-fees-a-review/
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It may well be, of course, that the argument, the economics and the law have all changed. But I do think it’s worth a read of the paper to have a check how much you can safely take on the word of an authority in football economics.
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