Performance, Diversity and National Identity Evidence From Association Football

Abstract

The increasing national diversity of coworkers has no consensus on its impact on performance. Using a team's predominant nationality as a proxy for national diversity and national identity, there is robust evidence that it affects team and individual performance. Detailed worker‐level data from a highly globalized industry, association football, show a nonlinear relationship between performance and the predominant nationality of a team's roster. As the number of members from the predominant nationality increases, performance declines. However, beyond a threshold level, performance rises. It follows that performance benefits from national diversity when the predominant nationality is small and from national identity when it is large. (JEL M14, Z21, Z22, J15)

Nostalgia in sport and leisure

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly had a tremendously adverse impact on the sport globally, marking itself as the worst market shock in the modern history of the sector [ 32 ]. The European football leagues were called off for the first time since World War II [ 32 , 33 ]. In addition, the British Broadcasting Corporation rebroadcasted the radio commentary for the final day of the 2019 Ashes cricket series (England vs. Australia) during the lockdown [ 3 ].…”

Foreign players, team production, and technical efficiency: Evidence from European soccer

“…(2013) reported that hockey teams benefit from the presence of foreign players in the squad; however, high levels of multiculturalism result in losses from integration costs. Similarly, Tovar (2020) showed that there is a nonlinear relationship between the predominant nationality of a team's roster and performance; performance improves only when a large share of the squad has the same nationality.…”

“…For the case of soccer, there is a burgeoning body of literature concerned about productive efficiency. Whereas some scholars study cost efficiency (Barros & Leach, 2007;Barros et al, 2009Barros et al, , 2015Ghio et al, 2019), others focus on sporting productive efficiency (Carmichael et al, 2017;Espitia-Escuer & García-Cebrian, 2010, 2020Jewell, 2017;Zambom-Ferraresi et al, 2017. 3 A stylized fact is the existence of high levels of efficiency, which is argued to be due to the highly competitive nature of the leagues.…”

“…There is some evidence that there are spillovers in professional sports team production so that both individual and team performance depend on the composition of the team (Arcidiacono et al., 2017; Gelade, 2018; Torgler & Schmidt, 2007). Whereas traditionally the literature has focused on racial discrimination (Kahane, 2005; Szymanski, 2000), a growing body of research has started to pay attention to the effect of cultural diversity on team performance (Addesa et al., 2022; Beine et al., 2021; Kahane et al., 2013; Tovar, 2020). While several works have detected positive gains from labor factor diversity when working together through skill complementarities (e.g., Roupakias & Dimou, 2020), the international mixing of players into the same squad might on the contrary create communication barriers that produce integration costs, in‐line with the seminal works by Lazear (1999a, 1999b).…”

The effects of participation in European competitions on the domestic competitiveness of Polish football clubs

“…Peeters and Szymanski (2014) believed that FFP would not significantly reduce competitive imbalance, but rather protect the competitive position of the wealthiest clubs. In effect, the most valuable resources, that is, the most skilled players, are still concentrated in the Big Five leagues (Frick, 2009;Tovar, 2020), often at the cost of overmanned rosters (Andreff, 2018).…”