Purpose

Revenue sharing is ubiquitous among North American professional sports leagues. Under pool revenue sharing, above-average revenue teams of a league effectively transfer revenues to below-average revenue teams. Herein, the authors find and prove that a league will vote into policy a pool revenue sharing arrangement if and only if mean team revenue is greater than presharing median revenue, where this condition is equivalent to the presence of positive nonparametric skewness in a league’s distribution of team revenues. This represents a median voter theorem for league revenue sharing.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors consider the case of revenue sharing for the National Football League (NFL), a league that pools and equally shares national revenues among member teams.

Findings

The authors find evidence of positive and significant nonparametric skewness in NFL team revenue distributions for the 2004–2016 seasons. This distribution is observed amid annual majority rule votes of League owners in favor of maintaining the incumbent pool revenue sharing model (as opposed to no team revenue sharing). Distribution of revenues – namely the existence of outlying large market NFL teams – appears to consistently explain the historical popularity of NFL revenue sharing.

Originality/value

The median voter theorem uncovered in the case of NFL applies to all professional sports leagues and can be used predictively as well as descriptively.

中文翻译：

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NFL球队收益分配和收益分享：中位数选民定理

目的

收益共享在北美职业体育联盟中无处不在。在集合收入共享下，联盟中高于平均水平的收入团队有效地将收入转移给低于平均水平的收入团队。在本文中，作者发现并证明，当且仅当平均团队收入大于预共享中位数收入时，联盟才会投票赞成一项池收益共享安排，在这种情况下，该条件等同于联盟分布中存在正非参数偏态团队收入。这代表了联盟收益分享的中值选民定理。

设计/方法/方法

作者考虑了国家橄榄球联盟（NFL）的收益共享情况，该联盟汇集并平均分配各成员球队之间的国家收益。

发现

作者发现，在2004-2016赛季NFL球队收入分配中出现了正的和显着的非参数偏斜的证据。在联盟所有者的年度多数规则投票中，观察到这种分布，赞成维持现有的共享池收益共享模式（而不是不分配团队收益）。收入分配，即外围大型NFL球队的存在，似乎始终如一地解释了NFL收入分成的历史性普及。

创意/价值

在NFL案例中发现的中值选民定理适用于所有职业体育联盟，并且可以用于预测性和描述性。