Political Economy of Sport in an Autocracy: Evidence from the Soviet football

Match-fixing is one of the most important issues for ensuring fair competition in various sports. Most often, the reason for a fixing match is financial gain, which one of the teams agrees to when losing the match. However, in an authoritarian regime, the motivation for match-fixing can be quite different, such as the decision of a government official who can choose which team should win. There is almost no empirical research on this topic, so I decided to focus on match-fixing within an authoritarian regime. In this paper, the USSR football championship is considered as a championship in which contractual matches were possible. In the period from 1951 to 1989, a positive relationship was found between the game of two teams from the same union republic and their probability of winning the next match, which can be explained by the previous contractual game between teams from the same republic, and due to this economy of forces. This effect is stronger towards the end of the championship and for the strongest teams of the republics since it is during this period and for these teams that it is most important to win to solve tournament problems. According to the results of this study, the Khrushchev era is distinguished as the period with the largest number of match-fixing.