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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the economic effects of Covid-19 on French men's professional basketball club championships. Three research questions are raised: What are the characteristics of the economic model of French men's professional basketball? Has this economic model changed over the 2008/2009 to 2018/2019 period? What are the economic effects of the Covid-19 crisis on the finance of French men's professional basketball clubs?

Relying on a privileged access to the financial data of professional clubs in the two top-tier divisions (456 observations: 222 in Pro A/Jeep Elite and 234 in Pro B), this research focuses on economic models of French men's professional basketball clubs. The breakdown of revenues, expenses and financial performance is examined over the 2008/2009 to 2018/2019 period. The short-term economic effects of Covid-19 are measured over the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 seasons.

The Covid-19 crisis, at least in the short term (2019/2020 season), has affected revenues and expenses. With the closedown of the championship, two out of three main revenue sources have significantly decreased, while two main expense sources have decreased as well. The net incomes of Jeep Elite and Pro B clubs are in the black contrasting with the 2018/2019 season (pre-Covid) owing to clubs having benefited from governmental and federal measures and a stronger support from local authorities and their shareholders.

Given the financial difficulties that clubs would have faced without governmental support, the federation and leagues would be well advised to develop a real crisis management competence within professional clubs. Owners of French professional men’s basketball clubs must increasingly adopt product diversification strategies to be better prepared for future crises.

Recent research on the economic effects of Covid-19 has focused on professional and amateur football. To the best of our knowledge, one does not avail detailed research on the potential effects of a health crisis fought with containment measures on professional basketball clubs. French professional basketball deserves to be studied because it has the third largest professional league revenue (behind football and rugby) and it is the second most practiced sport in France. Its sources of finance, which are different from those witnessed in football and rugby, also make it an appropriate subject for study.

This paper aims to propose a new model of economic behaviour in which activities are led by greed rather than by the traditional formal rules of capitalism.

This paper relies on the empirical observation of bad practices that developed in synchrony during the collapse of the former communist economic system and the rise of global financial capitalism. Both were fuelled by greedy behaviour of asset grabbing, and paved the way to an emerging greed-led economic system.

First, microeconomic individual greedy behaviours that drive asset grabbing are identified, such as rigged or corrupt privatisation drives, subprime mortgage loans, Ponzi schemes, lending to insolvent clients, bad loan securitisation, stock options, fraudulent accounting and online betting on fixed matches. Then systematic changes in the traditional formal rules of capitalism that favour those having adopted a greedy strategy are pointed at; greedy behaviour is institutionalised when these capture the state and successfully lobby for rules change. Contrary to capitalism, systemic greed uses asset grabbing, instead of capital accumulation, as its major means for wealth maximisation without constraint, in a winner-take-all economy beneficial to oligarchs.

The implications of this new systemic behaviour have implications for further economic modelling.

The emergence of systemic greed will have implications for the design of regulatory systems.

This paper proposes that a greed-controlled economy is replacing the traditional capitalist economy.

Analyzing how the post-Soviet transition interacts with the crisis of market finance exhibits a new “greed-based economic system” in the making. Asset grabbing is at its core and hinders capital accumulation. All the various privatization schemes have triggered off asset grabbing, asset stripping, and asset tunneling. A global contagion of such behavior has spread the power and cohesion of managers/shareholders (oligarchs) worldwide. Financial asset grabbing is less straightforward, though much widespread, and operates in financial markets through new financial products, securitization, firms buying their own shares, hedge funds, stock price manipulation, short selling, and the distribution of stock options.Shadow banking, and more generally a global informal economy, results from grabbing strategies in financial markets that breach the formal rules of capitalism. In alleviating and circumventing the rules, the oligarchy paves the way for economic malpractices and crime, calling capitalist laws into question.In such context, systemic greed underlies unconstrained maximization of relative wealth, for which asset grabbing is a rational means, in a winner-take-all economy. At the present stage of our research, a greed-based economy cannot yet be theoretically defined as a transition either to a new phase of capitalism or to another different system.

From the buying club’s perspective, the transfer of a player can be interpreted as an investment from which the club expects uncertain future benefits. This paper aims to develop a decision-oriented approach for the valuation of football players that could theoretically help clubs determine the subjective value of investing in a player to assess its potential economic advantage.

We build on a semi-investment-theoretical risk-value model and elaborate an approach that can be applied in imperfect markets under uncertainty. Furthermore, we illustrate the valuation process with a numerical example based on fictitious data. Due to this explicitly intended decision support, our approach differs fundamentally from a large part of the literature, which is empirically based and attempts to explain observable figures through various influencing factors.

We propose a semi-investment-theoretical valuation approach that is based on a two-step model, namely, a first valuation at the club level and a final calculation to determine the decision value for an individual player. In contrast to the previous literature, we do not rely on an econometric framework that attempts to explain observable past variables but rather present a general, forward-looking decision model that can support managers in their investment decisions.

This approach is the first to show managers how to make an economically rational investment decision by determining the maximum payable price. Nevertheless, there is no normative requirement for the decision-maker. The club will obviously have to supplement the calculus with nonfinancial objectives. Overall, our paper can constitute a first step toward decision-oriented player valuation and for theoretical comparison with practical investment decisions in football clubs, which obviously take into account other specific sports team decisions.