Let's Get Messi? Top‐Scorer Productivity in the European Champions League
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/sjpe.12044 |
| Published date | 01 July 2014 |
| Date | 01 July 2014 |
LET’S GET MESSI? TOP-SCORER
PRODUCTIVITY IN THE EUROPEAN
CHAMPIONS LEAGUE
Tim R. L. Fry*, Guillaume Galanos* and Alberto Posso*
ABSTRACT
Getting a player like Lionel Messi in the squad would seem like a dream come
true for a professional football manager, but is it always best to have top-quality
players? We study the determinants of top goal-scorers’ productivity in the
UEFA Champions League. We find evidence of a concave relationship between
age and productivity and uncover an inverted-U relationship between perfor-
mance and minutes played. Finally, we find a positive effect on height, being left
footed and being a striker on the probability of scoring a goal. The results have
important implications for managers both in looking to sign on new players and
to maximise their potential during a competitive match.
II
NTRODUCTION
Lionel Messi is probably the world’s best football player. He made his Euro-
pean Football debut for FC Barcelona in the 2004–2005 season. Thus far,
Messi has won a large number of awards during his relatively short career.
For example, he won the FIFA Ballon d’Or in 2010 and 2009, the FIFA
World Player of the Year in 2009, the European Golden Shoe in 2010, the
Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions League top
goal scorer in 2009, 2010 and 2011 and the Under-21 European Footballer of
the Year in 2007, to name a few. His skills on the pitch have also drawn com-
parisons to another Argentinean great, Diego Armando Maradona, who him-
self declared Messi as his successor (Reuters, 2006). Professional football
managers all over the world would, therefore, presumably be more than
happy to take Lionel Messi off FC Barcelona’s hands. However, would this
be the right thing to do? Moreover, if they did get a player like Messi, how
long should they play him for? More generally, what sort of characteristics
should managers be looking for in new players? This article applies panel data
econometric techniques to a large sample of 66 Champions League top goals
scorers from 1991 to 2011 to better understand top-scorer productivity within
a match and, thus, shed light on these issues.
*RMIT University
Scottish Journal of Political Economy, DOI: 10.1111/sjpe.12044, Vol. 61, No. 3, July 2014
©2014 Scottish Economic Society.
261
Champions League football is chosen for the analysis for two reasons. The
first is that it is unequivocally the most popularised year-on-year sports com-
petition on the planet. For the first time, according to a recent report, the US
National Football League’s Super Bowl has been overtaken by the UEFA
Champions League Final as the world’s most watched sporting event (Futures
Sport +Entertainment, 2009). Second, despite this recent trend, academics
have, by and large, ignored this competition. Among the few articles that look
into the Champions League, none study the determinants of goal scorers’ pro-
ductivity. Instead, some analysts have examined applications of economic the-
ory to the competition (Szymanski, 2007), while the majority focused on team
performance (Papahristodoulou, 2006; Page and Page, 2009).
1
Productivity of European football players has been analysed outside of the
Champions League. However, most studies aim to explain earnings using per-
formance or productivity as an explanatory variable. For instance, Lucifora
and Simmons (2003) examine the pay/performance relationship within Italian
football and find that big earners tend to outperform those players on a lower
pay scale. Similarly, Garcia-del-Barrio and Pujol (2007) demonstrate that not
only sportive performance but also popularity emerge as the main factors in
determining the market value of professional players in Spanish football. In
addition, Lehmann and Schulze (2008) show that measures of individual per-
formance such as goals, assists and successful tackles are positively correlated
with earnings of players in the German League (Bundesliga).
Torgler and Schmidt (2007) is the only other major study that aims to
explain productivity in terms of goals scored. The authors show that a
player’s salary affects his field performance, as measured by the number of
goals scored. N€
uesch (2009), however, suggests that the significant pay–perfor-
mance link in professional football disappears when a player’s talent is prop-
erly accounted for. He notes that neither a low salary nor one that is too high
can hinder a player from striving for the great satisfaction of scoring a goal.
He proposes that after controlling for both time-constant and time-varying
playing abilities, a player’s wage no longer impacts goal and assist scoring
performance. As a result, the omission of wages from a performance model,
such as the one used in this article, will not result in omitted variable bias
when the right controls are included.
There are three additional reasons why the omission of wage data will not
be problematic for the empirical estimations in this article. One is that player
salaries are based on average past performance and there is no reason to
expect that past performance will influence player performance during a par-
ticular match –which is our key variable of interest. Also, performance in a
particular match is not expected to influence wages in a season. These first
two reasons thus suggest that excluding wages from the model will not result
in omitted variable bias driven by the omission of a potentially endogenous
1
Team performance and wage implications have attracted the majority of economists to
the soccer literature. See for instance, Franck and N€
uesch (2011) for a discussion on the Ger-
man soccer league and Carmichael and Thomas (2000); Carmichael et al. (2001) for an
analysis of the English Premier League.
262 T. R. L. FRY, G. GALANOS, A. POSSO
Scottish Journal of Political Economy
©2014 Scottish Economic Society
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