Why are We So Good At Football, and They So Bad? Institutions and National Footballing Performance
- PDF / 1,959,357 Bytes
- 18 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 4 Downloads / 210 Views
Why are We So Good At Football, and They So Bad? Institutions and National Footballing Performance Meshael Batarfi1 · James Reade1 Accepted: 9 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The basic production technology in football is identical for each team that competes. All around the world, a field, goalposts and a ball is all that is required, in addition to players. It’s hard to imagine the quality of informal football in public parks, streets and alleys the world over differs much. Yet at each country’s highest level, there exists vast quality differences in the national football teams across countries. This paper sketches out broad patterns in this variation in performance, and seeks to understand why some countries are very good, whilst others perform poorly. We investigate a range of macroeconomic, demographic and political explanations, alongside more conventional sporting metrics. We also consider the extent to which they explain the observed variation in footballing performance historically. We find that higher level of GDP per capita helps nations to win more often, but that population hinders this. A more developed domestic footballing structure appears to be helpful too. Keywords Development · Contests · Sport JEL Classification O1 · C20 · L83
1 Introduction Outcomes matter. Economists are interested in the distribution of outcomes, especially if many salient features that matter for outcomes remain fixed. Around the world, people play football on streets, often in any kind of space that’s available. The authors would like to thank Mark Casson and Minyan Zhu for comments on this research as it has developed as part of Meshael’s PhD, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. All remaining errors are our own. * James Reade [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, University of Reading, Reading, UK
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
M. Batarfi, J. Reade
Even without grass and goalposts, or even a football, substitutes can be used— “jumpers for goalposts.” Almost every country in the world has a national football team that represents it. National teams play against each other in international competition and the pinnacle of the game is the showpiece event: the World Cup. This takes place every four years. Every country’s youngsters kick balls around, and there is no reason to believe kick-abouts in England or Germany differ much in quality from kick-abouts in Canada or China. Yet, in the 90-year history of the World Cup, only eight countries have won the event. Indeed, the variation can be stark; in the calendar year of 2011, Bolivia played 16 football matches and won none, while in 1984 France played 12 football matches and won all of them. As with general economic activity then, performance in football varies across countries, and it is interesting and important to ask why some countries perform better than others. In the spirit of Landes (1990) we ask why are certain countries so good at football and others so bad? In this paper, we answer this question by using a range of explanato
Data Loading...
