[microbrew]

Good intro article, covering players' market and competitive balance:http://www.iesbs.com/pdf/sports_economics.pdf In particular, section 3.5 mentions MLS and has a brief history of single entity ownership.

"The Sport League's Dilemma: Competitive Balance versus Incentives to Win by Frederic Palomino and Luca Rigotti", which concludes that "Under demand maximization, a performance-based reward scheme (used by European sport leagues) may be optimal. Under joint profit maximization, full revenue sharing (used by many US leagues) is always optimal."http://repositories.cdlib.org/iber/econ/E00-292/

A thread on points for "3 points for win, 1 for draw, who thought of this?" http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showt...threadid=20184 and a paper analyzing it: "Do the ‘three-point victory’ and ‘golden goal’ rules make soccer more exciting? A theoretical analysis of a simple game" by Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo of Columbia Business school. Paper at http://www.columbia.edu/~jc2095/PDFpapers/wp-foot.pdf

This paper, "It's Fourth Down and What Does the Bellman Equation Say? A Dynamic-Programming Analysis of Football Strategy" by David Romer, was in the news a few months ago. It looks at American football, but touches upon many thing applicable to sports in general. http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/dro...rs/nber9024.pdf

"Skill, Strategy, and Passion: an Empirical Analysis of Soccer" at http://ideas.repec.org/p/ecm/wc2000/1822.html