STADIUMS AND SCHEDULING: MEASURING DEADWEIGHT LOSSES IN THE VICTORIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE, 1920–70 BY LIONEL FROST, 1 *LUC BORROWMAN 2 &ABDEL K. HALABI 3 1 Monash University (lionel.frost@monash.edu), 2 Monash University Malaysia and 3 Federation University Australia Gippsland Campus Over a 50 year period, Australian Rules football’s major league, the Victorian Football League, did not always use its largest and best- equipped stadium for regular season games between its most popular teams or schedule those teams to play twice in a regular season. We calculate deadweight losses from the use of capital goods (stadiums) and effects of match scheduling in this professional sports league. Such analysis has not been attempted previously because of the absence of a counterfactual. The welfare losses were significant but not sufficient to threaten the survival of a distance-protected cartel. JEL categories: D42, L1, L83, N97 Keywords: deadweight loss, sports leagues, stadiums INTRODUCTION Australian Rules football’s major league, the Australian Football League (AFL), is the largest and most popular professional sports competition in Australia (Macdonald & Booth, 2007). Established in 1990, when the Victorian Football League (VFL) was renamed to reflect the spread of clubs beyond the state of Victoria, the AFL is now an 18-team competition with clubs based in each of the mainland states. Australian Rules is played at an elite level in only one country and developed idiosyncratic rules and practices in splendid isolation. In terms of the rise of professional sport worldwide, Australian Rules is an outlier in the general sense of the word. However, this does not mean that its experience should necessarily be discarded from broader consideration of the significance of deadweight losses in distance-protected sports leagues. * We thank Ross Booth, Jeff Borland, Robert Brooks, Sumner La Croix, Liam Lenten, Rod Maddock, David Merrett, Vinod Mishra, David Prentice, Andrew Seltzer, Russell Smyth, Jeffrey Williamson, and John Wilson for comments on earlier versions of this article. We thank Col Hutchinson (Australian Football League) and Trevor Ruddell (MCC Library) for access to data and Jenny Coates for research assistance. Australian Economic History Review, Vol. ••, No. •• 2017 ISSN 0004-8992 doi: 10.1111/aehr.12132 © 2017 Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd 1