Top NHL: Toronto Maple Leafs €102 millionHowever, even though European clubs appear to have more revenue, American sports teams on average are much more profitable, these different symptoms have developed due to the way the respective platforms were set up. What is a "platform"? According to the European economist Tobias Duschl, author of numerous works on the subject, he defines a platform as follows; “as any infrastructure that allows two or more parts of the market to interact with each other. Network effects typically characterize interactions enabled across platforms. Network effects are key in how all of this will relate to sports. However, before connecting these dots, it is worth talking about the two types of network effects. The first is the same side effect. This is the idea that when one side of a platform grows, it increases the overall attractiveness of the sides for others to join. A good example of this would be any social media platform. As more and more people become members of a particular social community, more and more people have a social incentive to join it because all the things they care about are already available.