IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/applec/v55y2023i6p577-593.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Moneyball in offensive versus defensive actions in football

Author

Listed:
  • Inna Zaytseva
  • Daniil Shaposhnikov

Abstract

Market inefficiencies, known as Moneyball effect, have been recently documented in different sports and their scope largely remains an empirical question. This article focuses on football, where fans and club managers seem to value forwards more than defenders. Apparently, football rules imply equally important roles for goals scored and goals conceded in a team win. Economic theory in this case suggests that marginal returns on offensive and defensive efforts should be equal. This prediction can be potentially violated, resulting in labour market inefficiency. To test this hypothesis, we use two separate data sets at team-game and player-season levels (1224 and 772 observations, respectively) from two seasons (2017/18–2018/19) of the German Bundesliga. We compare the relative contribution of the offensive and defensive actions to a team win with the same relative contribution to players’ market value and show that defensive actions are relatively underestimated by the market compared to the offensive.

Suggested Citation

  • Inna Zaytseva & Daniil Shaposhnikov, 2023. "Moneyball in offensive versus defensive actions in football," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 55(6), pages 577-593, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:55:y:2023:i:6:p:577-593
    DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2022.2091746
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2022.2091746
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00036846.2022.2091746?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:55:y:2023:i:6:p:577-593. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.