Could Fewer Teams Make a League More Competitive? The Portuguese Football League Case

The competitive balance of professional sports leagues has been a topic of interest in the area of sports economics. Our work aims to contribute to this field of research. Naturally, supporters’ expectations are that their club wins every game, but when a league becomes too unbalanced and its winner and all the other standings of interest are early known, that league tends to lose the supporters’ attention. The uncertainty of the results and of the final standings is a key factor in the attractiveness of every league. With the expectation of turning the Portuguese Football League more attractive, in 2006/07 the championship suffered a reduction in two contending clubs, from 18 to 16 teams. In our study we analyze the impact that this two-team reduction had on the competitiveness of the Portuguese league. In order to do this we have analyzed the standings of the League since 1991/92 and applied different methodologies to measure the competitive balance. We conclude that this measure does not improve the degree of competiveness expected by the league executives.