HIGHER QUALITY FOR EVERYONE BUT DISTRIBUTED LESS EQUALLY:

The World at Play: Soccer Takes on Globalization: The game offers lessons for managing movement of talented professionals around the world (Branko Milanovic, 15 June 2010, Yale Global)

For many of the billion spectators who watch the soccer World Cup opening in Rustenburg, South Africa, the word “globalization” may have come to mind. From advertisers to spectators, soccer embodies globalization like no other sport. And for players, soccer embodies globalization like no other profession.

The market for professional soccer players is, by far, the most globalized labor market. A Nigerian or Brazilian soccer player can get a job more easily in Europe or Japan than a skilled surgeon or engineer. Out of some 2,600 professional players in the five top European leagues – England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France – almost 800 are expatriates, defined as those born and recruited in a county different from the one where they play, according to data published by Professional Football Players Observatory for the last soccer season.

The market for professional soccer players is, by far, the most globalized labor market.
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Globalization of the world’s most popular game is responsible for two developments:

The first one cannot be easily quantified, but most observers agree that the quality of the game has improved: players have greater physical stamina, with better ball control and technique.

Rules limiting foreign players, Bosman argued and won, were in flagrant violation of EU freedom-of-movement and non-discrimination labor laws.

But also, global mobility of labor combined with a capitalist system, in which the richest clubs can buy the best players without salary caps or other limits, concentrates quality more than ever before. A handful of richest soccer teams buy the best players and collect the most trophies, thus boosting their popularity, developing an international fan base, selling more jerseys and advertisements, adding to their coffers and, in turn, buying better players.

The gap between the top clubs and the rest has widened in key Europeans leagues. During the last 15 years, all English soccer championships but one were won by the so-called “Big Four”: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. The concentration is greater in Italy: Only once during the last 20 years has a non top-four club won the Italian Serie A. It’s no surprise that the top four Italian clubs, like the top four English clubs, are on the list of the 20 richest clubs in the world. In Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona shared 17 out of the last 20 championships. In Germany, 13 out of the last 16 championships were won by two clubs.

Winners of the European Champions League are consistently from a narrowing circle of top, richest clubs. The Champions league is played annually, and over a five-year period, there theoretically could be 40 different teams in the quarter-finals. In the mid-1970s, that number was around 30. Since then, every successive five-year period produced a smaller number of teams, with only 21 in the period ending in 2010. The day could come when the same eight teams play in the quarterfinals, year in and year out – a trifle boring indeed.

At the club level, globalization combined with commercialization produces better quality of the game and greater concentration of winning clubs.

At the club level, globalization combined with commercialization thus produces two outcomes: better quality of the game, which is tantamount, in economics, to greater output; and greater concentration of winning clubs, which is tantamount to greater inequality.

One of the problems that the lesser clubs in the EPL run into is chasing the model of the bigger clubs without the resources to do so effectively. It leaves a huge Moneyballesque gap for teams to pursue a different model and take advantage of undervalued resources. In the current game there seem to be two main pools of such: youngsters and Americans (other than Brazilians and Argentines).

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2010 8:15 PM