No abstract

As on‐field success is nowadays the main objective of European soccer clubs, good management needs to extract the highest sport success from the squad talent at hand. Because teams differ in their quality, performance needs to be compared with the best practice of comparable units. One remarkable source of heterogeneity across teams is the squad composition, which can produce gains from diversity together with communication costs. The paper studies the efficiency in sporting performance of soccer teams, paying attention to how the number of foreign players relates to productive inefficiency. Using data for 146 teams in the top 5 European leagues during 10 seasons, we estimate a double heteroskedastic True Random Effects Stochastic Frontier team production function. We find that (i) the number of passes, ball recoveries, and shots from the penalty area improve team efficiency, and (ii) a higher number of foreign players increase inefficiency. Our findings suggest that gains from squad diversity might be offset by communication costs.

At the macro-level, it is hard to test the hypothesis that increased schooling in a country will raise labour productivity but sectoral analyses may be tractable. In sports, output is homogenous in that countries’ achievements are measurable in the same way. We examine country performances at the Chess Olympiad and the Olympic Games, contrasting tournaments where players in the first use only their minds but most in the second supply substantial physical effort or work with costly physical capital. Modelling success in either leads to a set of results familiar from sports literature: country performance depends on economic resources, represented by population size and per capita income. Supplementary variables capture over-performance by communist/ former communist countries. We then introduce a measure of average years of schooling. This significantly reduces the role of income, especially in chess. It also takes power away from the ‘communist’ variables, especially at the Olympics. These results suggest that much of any effect from income is mediated through schooling: investment in education is associated with elevated productivity. Increased productivity is observed in both settings, one a knowledge-intensive sub-sector and the other dependent to a significant extent on either raw physical strength or expensive capital input.