Competitive balance in complex professional sports leagues

Competitive balance is seen as crucial to the viability of professional sports leagues, and it has been a central concern of sports economists, industry practioners and fans. But the concept is complex and ill-defined. The theoretical approach in this thesis is to first analyse competitive balance in a simple league context. It is shown that even in a closed round-robin league with a single prize, there are three dimensions of competitive balance: win dispersion, performance persistence and prize concentration.