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Economics index ranks Olympians' earning power
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Cyclist Cadel Evans is leading the Australian Olympians' field and is 16th in the world on a new economics index which ranks Olympic athletes according to their media value.
The new, online, international ranking systems that calculates "media value" will give the world's elite athletes something more than just their medal tally to think about during these Olympics.
Queensland University of Technology economist Professor Benno Torgler said an athlete's media value reflected their earning potential from sponsorship and appearances as well as professional income.
"Media value changes day-by-day and is linked to on-field performance as well as off-field activity," said Professor Torgler, who is part of the research group Economics, Sport and Intangibles (ESIrg), a cluster of economists and scientists, founded and led by Spanish researchers.
Professor Torgler said ESIrg's Media Value Index for Olympic Athletes would be updated every three-five days during the Games.
"It contains three lists: a ranking of Australia's top athletes and those of other individual countries; the world's top 10-20 athletes from all disciplines; and also, a country ranking by the worldwide impact of their medal haul," he said.
"The studies indicate that 'media value', does reflect and predict individuals' income. For example, in regards to soccer, a 1 per cent increase in media value produces an increase of 0.5 per cent in the payments made for players between clubs.
"Media value leads to economic and commercial power of individuals and teams."
Professor Torgler said the seemingly intangible notion of media value was made by calculating "popularity" and "notoriety".
"Both measures are very difficult to calculate but ESIrg has developed an innovative way to capture them as well as possible," he said.
"The popularity measure reflects the public's interest in a particular athlete through their mentions in web pages, blogs and galleries as well as specialised web pages such as official sports institutions, commercial firms and the media.
"We filter the search process so that we consider only the web pages which refer to the athlete, the team in which they play and the related sport or competition."
Professor Torgler said athletes' notoriety was measured by the number of news items each player generated in a given time.
"Again, we filter the search process to measure the amount of mass media exposure each athlete received. This measure is linked to their present sport performance and to a lesser extent their personal or social activities.
"We then combine the popularity and notoriety measure."
He said the ESIrg methodology had been successfully applied in recent years and enabled the evaluation of the media value of professional sport competitions such as soccer, basketball, Formula1, Tour de France, tennis and baseball.
"The approach has also been expanded to analyse media coverage in elections, for example the US elections."
Media value reports will be available from http://www.unav.es/econom/sport/index.php?section=1 from next week.
"The strength of the methodology is to provide a homogenous individual measure of media value in different environments at any point in time," Professor Torgler said.
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| Professor Benno Torgler assesses the earning potential of our olympic athletes. |
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