Accessibility navigation


Why are we so good at football, and they so bad? Institutions and national footballing performance

Reade, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8610-530X and Batarfi, M. (2021) Why are we so good at football, and they so bad? Institutions and national footballing performance. De Economist, 169 (1). pp. 63-80. ISSN 1572-9982

[img]
Preview
Text (Open Access) - Published Version
· Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
· Please see our End User Agreement before downloading.

2MB
[img] Text - Accepted Version
· Restricted to Repository staff only

3MB

It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing.

To link to this item DOI: 10.1007/s10645-020-09379-6

Abstract/Summary

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, national football teams, vast quality differences exist 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, and 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.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Politics, Economics and International Relations > Economics
ID Code:94438
Publisher:Springer

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Page navigation