Image is everything! Professional football players' visibility and wages: evidence from the Italian Serie A

ABSTRACT

Sport is one of the most popular forms of entertainment and its worldwide spread has turned athletes into icons who have economic impact and international visibility as global brands. In our paper we would like to show how marketing strategies in the sports industry, amplified by social networks, have put the athlete at the centre of media attention In the world of football, football players have come to play a key role, since their image is the face of their clubs, and this can affect the number of digital fans, that is, fans who are not bound to a club by constant passion but who can change team depending on the athletes that have been lined up. This could explain why the teams playing in the main football championships are offering higher and higher wages in the attempt to get hold of the best talents around. Based on a dataset with information about over 1,200 athletes who have taken part over five seasons of the Italian Serie A, we try to measure the impact of football players’ popularity on salary-setting mechanisms, in the attempt to understand the impact of such variables on football players’ athletic qualities and performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Football
• wage determinants
• panel data estimations
• superstar effect

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• Codes: Z22
• E24
• C23

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editor, two anonymous reviewers, Michele Battisti, Pedro Garcia del Barrio and Giuseppe Maggio for their useful comments and suggestions which improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. NBA was the first sport to enforce a wage ceiling, in 1984. Such a form of control meant that no more than 53% of the gross revenues of the entire League could be paid into the American basketball players’ wages. However, within such overall limits, wages are personally negotiated in the US sports as well (Staudohar 1998).

2. Table A1 in Appendix 2 shows an additional version of descriptive statistics where the wage is clustered by club memberships.

3. Literature has shown wage differentials according to the position on the field. Evidence suggests that the best-paid football players are forwards and midfielders (Garcia‐del‐Barrio & Pujol (2007); Feess et al. (2004)), even if some studies found quite controversial evidence (Lehmann and Schulze (2008)). Note that most of the papers that dealt with this topic built their analyses using goalkeepers as a reference group (Huebl & Swieter (2002); Feess et al. (2004); Frick (2006)). However, this paper, in the footsteps of Lehmann & Schulze (2008), will use the midfielder as a dummy field position, since it is the largest variable and is midway between the defender and the forward.

4. Literature explored the effect of football player’s native country on the wage level. The world of sports is fertile ground for a study of discriminatory or segregationist effects, which, especially in US sports (mainly basketball and baseball), have been extensively investigated (Kahn, 1992; Sandy et al., 2004; von Almen et al., 2015) but also in Europe (Poli, 2006). In addition to such evidence, there seems to be a sort of selection when the football players leave their native countries, especially in the more competitive football markets (Frick, 2006; Lehmann & Weigand, 1999; Feess et al., 2004; Garcia‐del‐Barrio & Pujol, 2007; Bryson et al., 2014). In the light of such findings, we decided to use dummies of the native countries to reflect the fact that foreign football players, ceteris paribus, may be paid higher wages to “be persuaded” to emigrate.

5. See for instance Bond et al., 2020

6. We partially cover this analysis in the small sample of Section 3.1.

7. A loan is an agreement between two teams whereby a football player plays for the team that he is not under contract to, either for a fee (for a consideration) or by simply paying the football player’s wages (free of charge). Usually, when a player is on loan his wage should be higher respect to the team’s average, since the club can benefit from its performance avoiding the cost of transfer. Moreover, the parent club may choose to fully, partly or not subsidize the players wages when on loan. Even the years a football player has been in his club can be a very interesting variable for our purposes. On the one hand, players playing for the same club for multiple seasons will assumedly steal the fans’ hearts, thus increasing their bargaining power towards the club. On the other hand, football players could use the strategy of changing teams quite frequently to get higher wages and new financial and professional benefits.

8. Socialblade.com is a website that keeps track of statistic trends in social media profiles

9. Table A5 in the Appendix shows the results of Table 7 by including Google Trend 3 as main dependent variable.

10. Mario Balotelli’s June 2012 observation.

11. As above mentioned, Google Trends does not let compare more than five terms at a single time. Therefore we divided the 1266 in several subgroups of 4 players in order to compare them with Mario Balotelli’s June 2012 observation.