Is UEFA right? Measuring competitiveness of domestic football leagues

Industry concentration measures have been widely used in the analysis of industry competition. However, no attempt has been made to extend these measures to the sport industry. This paper measures the degree of competition among clubs in the major European soccer playing countries. UEFA seasonally ranks European countries and while this ranking serves to measure how 'good' a country's football league is, it fails to explain how competitive is a country's domestic league. Football teams, like firms, compete in a closed market for points. This paper does a comparative analysis of domestic football leagues to measure the extent to which there is 'market share domination' using measures of industrial concentration. Our paper analyses data from 2000–2001 to 2004–2005 1st division domestic league competitions of the top 20 UEFA ranked countries. Our study points to an alternative measure of ranking football leagues using our competitiveness index.