The Economics of Football

[Tiresais]

Professionals Play Minimax (or how Game Theory and penalties combine)

Mentioned that I had read a paper on penalties before, William Easterly put it up on his twitter feed so you can read it if you're particularly mathematically-minded and enjoy the read; http://www.palacios-huerta.com/docs/professionals.pdf

Headline figures;

The strategy followed by goalkeepers coincides with that followed by kickers in about half of all penalty kicks in the data set. Most are RR (27·6%), with 19·6% being LL and 0·3% being CC. Kickers kick to the centre relatively rarely (7·5% of all kicks), whereas goalkeepers choose C even less often (1·7%). The percentage of kicks where players’ strategies do not coincide with each other are almost equally divided between LR (21·9%) and RL (21·7%). A goal is scored in 80·1% of all penalty kicks. The scoring rate is essentially 100% when the goalkeeper’s choice does not coincide with the kicker’s, and it is over 60% when it coincides. It is well known that soccer matches last two equal halves of 45 min, with a 15 min half-time interval. The scoring rate in the sample is slightly lower in the second half (78·3%) than in the first half (82·9%), and substantially lower in the last 10 min of a game (73·3%) than the overall average (80·1%). The average number of goals per match in the sample is 2·57. It is thus no surprise to observe that in most penalty kicks the score difference is 0, 1, or −1 at the time of the shot. For these score differences, the scoring rate is slightly greater in tied matches (81·9%), followed by the rate in matches where the kicker’s team is behind by one goal (80·2%), and then by the rate in matches where his team is ahead by one goal (77·8%).

Basically, penalty kicks agree with what we would expect - as an aggregate penalties are probabilistically random (i.e. a mixed strategy), with right-footed players favouring the RHS of the keeper (i.e. their left), and Left-footed players favouring the LHS of the keeper. If you've ever studied game theory, then you would expect this, but it's always nice to see that theory is confirmed by reality . Also, there are some interesting statistics in there.

[Tiresais]

National Cultures and Soccer Violence
Edward Miguel, Sebastián M. Saiegh, Shanker Satyanath

Abstract:

Can some acts of violence be explained by a society's "culture"? Scholars have found it hard to empirically disentangle the effects of culture, legal institutions, and poverty in driving violence. We address this problem by exploiting a natural experiment offered by the presence of thousands of international soccer (football) players in the European professional leagues. We find a strong relationship between the history of civil conflict in a player's home country and his propensity to behave violently on the soccer field, as measured by yellow and red cards. This link is robust to region fixed effects, country characteristics (e.g., rule of law, per capita income), player characteristics (e.g., age, field position, quality), outliers, and team fixed effects. Reinforcing our claim that we isolate cultures of violence rather than simple rule-breaking or something else entirely, there is no meaningful correlation between a player's home country civil war history and soccer performance measures not closely related to violent conduct.

Download here; http://www.nber.org/papers/w13968

[Tiresais]

International hostility and aggressiveness on the soccer pitch Evidence from European Championships and World Cups for the period 2000-2012
Caruso, Raul and Di Domizio, Marco

Abstract:

Some Researchers consider soccer matches as the stylization of a war in other battlefields. Such approach was largely used to interpret the violent phenomena related to the soccer environment, while less attention has been paid to the «potential» role of political and economic interactions between countries in determining the aggressive attitude of players on the pitch. In our paper we empirically investigate if and how political hostility among countries reverberates on a soccer pitch by influencing players’ aggressiveness. The analysis focuses on official matches played by national teams in the final phases of the European and World Cup tournaments since 2000. We estimate a Negative Binomial regression including both political and sport variables, and we find that (a) commercial hostility; (b) the level of diplomatic relationships, (c) power asymmetry and (d) education gap between countries are positively and significantly associated with aggressiveness of the players on the pitch, approximated by the number of yellow and red cards. That is, briefly stated, international hostility reverberates into the pitch. Moreover, sport covariates present the expected signs, namely results show that the closeness of the teams, their ranking and the stage of the game (knockout stages with respect to the group phases) are also crucial in determining the cautions.

Download here; http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/50099/