The relative age effect on labour market outcomes – evidence from Italian football

ABSTRACT

Research question: This study investigates whether the relative age effect (RAE) persists in the long term and affects Italian-born footballers’ performance and wages.

Research methods: A unique dataset on 1700 individual players’ remuneration and performance was collected and analysed through the chi-square goodness-of-fit, the Spearman’s rank correlation and an econometric model.

Results and findings: This study contributes to the literature by providing clear results on long-term RAE. We find evidence of the RAE in terms of representativeness, which means that, in an age group, players born relatively early are over-represented, while those born relatively late are under-represented, even accounting for national birth trends. Moreover, although they perform similarly, the gross wages of players born relatively late are statistically significantly lower than those of players born relatively early.

Implications: This situation needs to be considered by various football stakeholders and tackled accordingly to minimize the loss of potential youth football talent. Further research is needed to identify the determinants of RAE in the long term.

KEYWORDS:

• Relative age
• labour markets in sports

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dan-Olof Rooth, Magnus Carlsson, Simone Scarpa, Peter Karlsson, Håkan Locking, Florian Loffing, Benjamin Gibbs, Ron Smith, PhD fellows from the Department of Economics and Statistics of the Linnaeus University, for valuable feedback; participants at the seminars series of the Centre for Labour Market and Discrimination Studies, Linnaeus University; participants at the AIEL conference, 2014, Pisa; participants at the SWEGPEC PhD workshop, 2014, in Jönköping. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect those of STATEC and funding partners. Luca Fumarco gratefully acknowledges the support of the Observatoire de la Compétitivité, Ministère de l’Economie, DG Compétitivité, Luxembourg and STATEC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Luca Fumarco http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6236-0197

Giambattista Rossi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0167-9708