Ursus — I can’t say much about the coverage of sports economics in the continental press, but one reason I think there’s so much of it in American sports journalism is the prevalence among American teams of revenue-sharing systems. Much more than in European football, profits and resources are pooled among American sports franchises in order to keep larger and smaller teams (theoretically, anyway) on a level playing field. So every financial move a team makes tends to have complex salary-cap or luxury-tax ramifications that will directly affect a team’s ability to compete on the field, and so for fans, understanding the money game becomes an extension of knowing the rules of the sport. And thus the media covers it, and thus, in a hugely roundabout way, comparatively greater financial transparency enters American sports.

The focus on the “game” being played by general managers isn’t always the most appealing aspect of US sports coverage (am I really meant to accept Theo Epstein as my new sports hero?). But I would imagine the difference between what the average American basketball fan knows about the complexities of money in the NBA and what the average English soccer fan knows about the complexities of money in the Premier League is enormous.

Completely agree with your point about the ever-increasing volume of non-investigative sports coverage drowning out the investigative stuff, by the way.

You could easily leave out “football” from that line…you could say that the sports media follows the lead set by the political or the business media in investigating stories, or lack thereof. If anything–and I’m generally talking about the American media here–I think sports reporters sometimes do more reporting of uncomfortable facts than you find on the front pages.

I’d be interested to hear what the two of you and others think, but to me, British sports journalists are also behind their North American colleagues when it comes to understanding and trying to explain the economic context of the sports they cover. Sure, the same laziness, lack of sufficient background and fear of alienating sources and losing “access” that one imagines motivates a good deal of the British “neglect” in this respect also operates in North America, but the reality of franchise moves, labor stoppages and salary caps has meant that even the Rileys, Simmonses and Lupicas of the world will have written about economic and “management” issues to a much greater extent than their UK colleagues.

Interestingly enough, I would say that such issues also tend to get better coverage in the Continental European sports press, though I can’t tell you for sure why that is. Possible causes that come immediately to mind include the fact that the continental sports press is inherently more “serious” than its British counterpart, that the individuals who control “big” clubs (at least in Italy and Spain) are considered inherently more newsworthy than than counterparts in the UK and the fact that the not insignificant number of bankruptcies and financial scandals involving “big” clubs that we have seen on the continent has tended to focus the mind.