Football Tournaments and Economic Sentiment: Cross-Country Evidence from Europe

Do major football tournaments move economic sentiment, and does it matter whether a country's national team takes part? We combine the European Commission's harmonized business and consumer surveys for the 27 EU member states from 1991 to 2025 with 17 World Cups and European Championships. The Economic Sentiment Indicator is about 2.3 points higher in tournament months than in other months of the same calendar year, but it is similarly elevated in the two months before; consumer confidence shows no robust pattern. Because the tournament calendar is common to all countries and almost all tournaments fall in even years, this association rests on 17 events and cannot be separated from a broader two-year rhythm in sentiment; relative to randomly drawn years, it is unusual before 2020 and marginal in the full sample (p = 0.08 to 0.14). Participation varies across countries and can be tested with full time fixed effects, under weaker assumptions. We find no statistically significant participation premium in the baseline specification and no participation-specific jump at kick-off in any specification; large premia are hard to reconcile with the data, smaller ones remain possible.