ABSTRACT
Market inefficiencies, known as Moneyball effect, have been recently documented in different sports and their scope largely remains an empirical question. This article focuses on football, where fans and club managers seem to value forwards more than defenders. Apparently, football rules imply equally important roles for goals scored and goals conceded in a team win. Economic theory in this case suggests that marginal returns on offensive and defensive efforts should be equal. This prediction can be potentially violated, resulting in labour market inefficiency. To test this hypothesis, we use two separate data sets at team-game and player-season levels (1224 and 772 observations, respectively) from two seasons (2017/18–2018/19) of the German Bundesliga. We compare the relative contribution of the offensive and defensive actions to a team win with the same relative contribution to players’ market value and show that defensive actions are relatively underestimated by the market compared to the offensive.
Acknowledgement
Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).