Sports Economics

Join us for a unique event to discuss sports economics with Stefan Szymanski and Jelle Schoemaker. Stefan will consider why football is loss-making, despite being the most popular sport in the world.  Jelle will discuss research on the contribution of sport to subjective wellbeing, including the capacity of sport to provide ‘well-being medicine’. This event promises to provide valuable insights into the relationship between sports, economics, and societal wellbeing.

Jelle Schoemaker is a Lecturer-Researcher at the Sports Economics Research Centre (SERC) of the HAN University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.

As an economist specializing in sport, his work focuses on optimizing the societal impact of public investments in sport and physical activity. He is the author of the book Winnen & Winsten in de Sportbusiness (Prizes & Profits in Sports Business). His research centers on the evaluation and valuation of sports programs. He investigates how public funds can be deployed effectively to maximize benefits for society. His approach often involves measuring the direct effects of interventions and quantifying the value of these effects in monetary terms to facilitate policy comparison and decision-making. Currently, he employs Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE) to analyse how citizens trade off effectiveness outcomes against fairness and public costs in sports. In November 2025, he published the paper titled “The Well-Being Value of Sport for Loneliness and Depression” in the Journal of Sports Economics. This research utilized a large dataset to demonstrate that the well-being benefits of sport are particularly high for vulnerable groups.

Dr. Stefan Szymanski is a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology.

Before coming to U-M in 2011, he had appointments at London Business School, Imperial College Business School, and Cass Business School, all in London. Dr. Szymanski completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford, and received his PhD in Economics at Birkbeck College, University of London. As a leading expert in the economics of sports in general and soccer in particular, he is widely quoted in the media and has written op-eds for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Financial Times. Dr. Szymanski has authored more than one hundred academic papers published in reviewed journals, mostly on the economics and history of sport. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller, Soccernomics (with Simon Kuper), the fourth edition of which appeared in 2018. Dr. Szymanski has appeared as an expert witness on the economics of sport in numerous court cases on issues such as the collective sale of broadcast rights, the valuation of soccer clubs, and recently for the US Department of Justice on the economics of corruption in relation to the trial of former FIFA executives.

The seminar will be streamed live via Zoom.

Members can register via the SPE Notices.