Altitude as handicap in rank-order football tournaments

ABSTRACT

The structure of professional sports allows us to document predictions from the theory of rank-order tournaments (Lazear and Rosen 1981). In the context of South American FIFA World Cup Qualifiers, under the presence of heterogeneous agents, handicapping the best quality players may increase the tournaments’ efficiency by making the contest more competitive. In particular, we show that playing in high-altitude stadiums (above 2500 m) constitutes a handicap as the otherwise least competitive teams benefit from the existence of an altitude advantage.

KEYWORDS:

• Contest theory
• optimal handicap
• football

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C12
• C2
• D6
• L3

Acknowledgements

This article benefited from helpful comments from Javier Asensio, Clement Malgouyres, Richard Pollard, Federico Todeschini, Francesc Trillas, Orestis Troumpounis and Yanos Zylberberg. Both authors thank them very much for excellent feedback. All remaining errors are ours.

ORCID

Agustin Casas http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8588-5562

Notes

¹ Where the possible teams are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador,Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela, alphabetically.

² Here we index by as well because the coefficient is not the same across all teams.