Vale 1 Ross Booth (1952–2024)

Among his colleagues in North America and Europe, Ross Booth, who died on June 3, 2024, was synonymous with Australian sports economics. For the past quarter century, Ross was a regular presence at sessions sponsored by the North American Association of Sports Economists (NAASE), International Association of Sports Economists (IASE), and more recently at European Sport Economics Association (ESEA) conferences. He was one of the original members of NAASE in 2007, and served as vice-president for both that organization and for IASE. To this day he remains the only person outside of North America or Europe to have served as an officer for NAASE. ² He was on the editorial board of the International Journal of Sport Finance, again serving as the lone Australian on this well-regarded journal. Closer to home, Ross also served on the editorial board of Sporting Traditions, the journal of the Australian Society for Sports History.

Ross commenced his studies at Monash University in 1971 as an undergraduate student and completed an honors degree in economics after which he worked for a brief period of time at the University of Melbourne and Melbourne Grammar School. Ross returned to Monash University as a staff member in 1988 and spent the rest of his career at Monash University. Ross had a passion for teaching economics and developed and introduced a highly successful sports economics course that has been part of the Monash economics undergraduate curriculum since 2001. Many Monash economics alumni say how much they enjoyed the unit and the opportunity to study with Ross. It is also notable how many of Professor Booth's academic presentations included his students as co-authors.

Ross's research focused on applying standard sports economic techniques to the unique circumstances of Australian sports with a particular focus on the Australian Football League (AFL). Indeed, most of what any of us in the academic community outside of Australia know about Australian rules football we learned from Ross. The AFL has several qualities that make it distinct among world sports leagues. As Professor Booth pointed out in his 2004 Economics Papers and 2005 Sports Management Review papers, the AFL is a closed league like the major North American Leagues, but the teams are club-owned, like many European soccer teams, a sort of hybrid reality. MacDonald and Booth (2007) formulated this into an Australian model of sports leagues with 13 distinctive characteristics to set the Australian approach apart from those in Europe and North America.

In terms of league design, AFL teams are best described as win-maximizers subject to a budget constraint rather than profit-maximizers but still operating in a closed-league system. Thus, steps taken to promote competitive balance in the league may have a different effect in Australia than theory would suggest for leagues in either Europe or North America (Booth, 2004, 2005). The VFL (the Victorian forerunner competition to the AFL ³ ) had become concerned about competitive imbalance across the 1970s and early 1980s and so moved to introduce a player draft and salary cap in the 1980s. A key research question was, therefore, the effectiveness of these measures. Ross’ 2004 and 2005 papers explore how changing arrangements around player recruitment, player labor markets and revenue sharing amongst clubs influenced competitive balance, and in that setting he identified six different time periods between 1897 and 2004. Between 1930 and 1967 player salaries were heavily capped by the Coulter Law, ⁴ and the removal of the Coulter Law lead to significant growth in player salaries and the competition became less balanced across the 1970s and early 1980s. Ross’ analysis demonstrated that the changed arrangements around player recruitment, player labor markets and revenue sharing had enhanced competitive balance even in an environment of higher player salaries. In subsequent research, Lenten (2009) estimates an increased attendance in the range of 2–3 million over the period from 1985 to 2005 due to the improved competitive balance from the introduction of the player draft and salary cap.

While player salaries had grown significantly from the 1970s the AFL only agreed to player salaries being a share of industry revenue comparatively recently in 2017. Ross’ research (Booth et al., 2012a, 2012b) explored how player salary shares would evolve in the setting of an Australian sports league model in the absence of an agreement to pay a guaranteed share of revenue and showed how the configuration of Australian sporting leagues would lead to the share falling over time. In addition, the player salary share would be lower than the North American setting because of the league needing to devote a much higher percentage of its revenue toward the development of the game.

A further area of development by the AFL has been in managing aggression and violence in the game with a goal of maintaining the attractiveness of participation to families in the light of changing community expectations in that regard. The AFL changed its arrangements with a match review panel system. Ross’ research (Booth & Brooks, 2011) found that the new arrangements had significantly reduced on-field violence, but there remains an ongoing fan preference for controlled aggressions and the theatre of violence. Overall, Ross's contributions to the literature highlighting these unusual aspects of the AFL have been invaluable for other sports economists around the world.

Professor Booth was not afraid to venture away from his home ground of “footy”, but he almost always remained a fan, academically at least, of Australian sports, publishing studies of the A-League, the country's top professional soccer league, F1, which has long featured a popular race in Melbourne, netball, another sport with outsized popularity in Australia, and of course, rugby (Booth, 2008, 2013; Judde et al., 2013; MacDonald & Booth, 2007).

Ross's impact on the sports world went far beyond his work as an academic. Ross was a well-known Australian Rules football player and commentator. For members of the academic sports economics community, it might be difficult imagining the mild-mannered Ross Booth resorting to controlled aggression back in his playing days as a tough midfielder! From 1971 to 1983, Ross had a distinguished playing career in the Victorian Amateur Football Association (VAFA) playing over 100 games with each of the Monash Blues Football Club (1971–1973) and the University Blacks Football Club (1977–1983). He was the Blues’ captain and was named the club's best-and-fairest winner in both 1973 and 1974. In 1976 he was runner-up in the VAFA's league-wide best-and-fairest selection. He also played representative football for the VAFA state team. In 2011 he was named to the Monash Blues all half century team. Shortly following his retirement as a player, Ross was appointed as a VAFA executive board member in 1986, a role he served in for nearly a quarter century. Ross became a life member of the VAFA in 2003.

Ross embarked upon a career as a football commentator in 1987 when he joined the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to work on games in the Victorian Football Association (later renamed the Victorian Football League), the playing division just below the AFL. He also wrote commentary for print media. He was a prominent enough figure that one NAASE member recounts walking down the street with Ross during an American academic conference and being astonished to be stopped by two young Australian football fans asking for Ross’ autograph.

The Victorian Amateur Football Association noted in their remembrance of Ross that he was a “champion footballer and even a better bloke.” While few of us in the sports economics community can comment on his playing days, we can all agree with their second point. Ross will be deeply missed.