Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports

Books examining the financial aspects of American sports have proliferated recently, but none offers the range and depth of this first volume in a projected two-volume study. Quirk, a retired economics professor at Cal Tech, and Fort, an associate professor of economics at Washington State University, cover professional baseball, football, basketball and hockey in their definitive study. They examine the prices and values of sports franchises; the tax shelters developed by owners; the real and imaginary worth of stadiums and arenas, both publicly and privately owned; the reserve clause, designed to limit players' mobility; the increasing inequity of players' salaries; the attempts to secure and retain competitive balance in various leagues with a view to the maximization of profits; and the establishment of rival leagues (``a very risky business''). In every chapter the authors document their arguments with copious statistics. General readers may find the text more technical than they would like, but this is certainly important reading for anyone engaged in sports at any level. Illustrations. (Dec.)