I see even Huffington Post picked up this ridiculous headline mucking around on the Internets. At Spiked, Brendan O'Neill offered a helpful hysteriagraphy historiography of the meme a few days back. A report last year debunked the idea that there is a link between mega-sporting-events...
meaningless statistics
I usually find Nate Silver's stuff over at 538 (and especially at BP) careful and sound, if often atheoretical. On balance his foray into politics and political science in the.
To follow-up on Neyer's excellent point about the idiotic Team Marketing Report, the one that he quotes (despite the large amount of discretionary purchases it includes) is actually a little.