Does changing the coach help? How big is the home advantage? Does the crowd matter? These are questions that interest Niklas Jakobsson, professor in national economics at Karlstad Business School.
– Much of the discussion in sports deals with questions that are essentially economic in nature, he says.
Niklas Jakobsson has always liked individual sports, but his interest in team sports has grown in recent years.
– Football came into my life through my son and the Allsvenskan, while ice hockey is close at hand through Färjestad and the SHL. Both sports stir strong emotions while also producing a lot of data, which makes them well suited for analysis.
It is mainly football and ice hockey that have sparked Niklas’s interest. And students are quick to engage when the referee’s whistle sounds.
– Sports examples work well because students often quickly grasp the context. From there, we can discuss more general questions: What is a reasonable comparison group? What would have happened otherwise? Why isn’t it enough to compare before and after? Sports statistics are a great way to communicate research and methodology. Quite advanced analytical problems become both understandable and engaging for our students.
On Substack, Niklas Jakobsson publishes articles and analyses of sports results. The posts often focus on testing claims commonly heard in the sports world and demonstrating them with real match data.
– I’ve written about coaching changes in both the Allsvenskan and the SHL and about the common belief that teams start performing better after a coach is fired, explains Niklas Jakobsson. I’ve also written about home advantage in football and hockey, whether some teams have a greater home advantage than others, and whether cup matches or European fixtures a few days before a league game actually lead to poorer performance.
How does this connect with your research and teaching at the School of Business?
– It’s very directly connected, says Niklas Jakobsson. Much of both my research and teaching is about distinguishing correlation from causation. That’s exactly the same problem in sports. Just because a team starts winning after a coaching change doesn’t necessarily mean that the change caused the improvement.
– And this also ties in with the School of Business’s master’s program in applied economics and advanced analytical methods. There, we train students in skills that are in demand across a wide range of sectors—from sports clubs to public agencies and private companies. What they have in common is that many organizations want answers to causal questions: What works? For whom? And how do we know?
This interest has also led Niklas further into sports research more broadly. He is currently working on three academic articles related to sports, where sports data is used with social science methods to study questions relevant to economics.
What is the most common finding you’ve been able to draw from your research?
– A recurring result is that simple narratives often become too dominant. Home advantage exists, but it has several causes. Teams sometimes improve after coaching changes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the change was the cause. Fixture congestion from cup competitions sounds like a reasonable explanation after a loss, but in the data I’ve examined, there is no clear decline in results.
This summer there is a Football World Cup – who will win?
– The statistically honest answer is that no team has a particularly high probability of winning. It’s also often more interesting to analyze afterward why things turned out the way they did than to pretend you know in advance. So I’ll probably refrain from making a confident prediction.
