This paper is motivated by the observation that there is a large discrepancy among football nations regarding the number of football players that play in the national team and also in their home league. Two extreme examples are Argentina and Italy : Almost all members of the national team of Argentina play in a foreign football league and all national team players of Italy play in their home league. We focus on the question whether a country's success in international competitions significantly depends on the mobility of its football players. More specifically, we analyze whether a country's success is influenced (i) by the number of national team players that do not play in the home league and (ii) by the number of national team players from other countries that play in the home league. Our study is based on data of all 32 national football teams qualified for the FIFA World Cup in Germany 2006 including more than 700 players with a total estimated market value of almost four billion Euros. The main finding is that a country's success crucially depends on both imports and exports. This suggests that all countries that qualified for the World Cup gain from trade.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: