Efficiency in Knock-out Tournaments: Evidence from EURO 2004

Abstract

This paper compares team performances in the EURO 2004 soccer tournament using average and frontier production functions to examine each teams’ relative efficiency. The evidence suggests that while the eventual tournament winners were not obviously superior in terms of a range of individual performance criteria, they were one of the most efficient teams in converting overall match play into results.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Gareth Thomas for assistance with data collection and Peter Williams for comments on earlier drafts. The helpful suggestions of three reviewers are acknowledged.

Notes

1. Apart from Portugal, as host nation, and France, as the reigning champions from the previous EURO 2000 tournament, the seedings were based on the record of the teams during the EURO 2004 qualifying stages and the 2002 World Cup. The sixteen participating teams were arranged in four tiers or pools, with one team selected from each pool to make up a tournament group. The top tier of seeds comprised: France as reigning champions (and coincidentally the team with the best pre-tournament qualifying record), Portugal as hosts, together with the Czech Republic and Sweden. The second tier comprised England, Germany, Italy and Spain; with Croatia, Denmark, the Netherlands and Russia in the third tier; and Bulgaria, Greece, Latvia and Switzerland in the bottom tier.

2. If neither of these two criteria could separate teams, the qualifying placings would be determined by further criteria including, ultimately, the drawing of lots.

3. A full discussion of pre-tournament rankings and absolute values of each team's match plays are provided in Carmichael and Thomas (2005a).

4. See Scully (1989) for an updated version of his 1974 model, and Dawson, Dobson, and Gerrard (2000a) and Dobson and Goddard (2001) for reviews of the literature on sporting production functions.

5. The data were collated by accessing BENQ EURO (2004), BBC Sport (2004) and Soccernet.com (2004) throughout the tournament. Consistent data were available only for overall tournament performances.

6. Yellow card cautions are awarded for a variety of offences. While not all arise from tackle-related fouls, they may be generally viewed as indicating aggression and/or desperation and indiscipline. Two yellow cards result in a red card and a player's dismissal from the field of play.

7. In addition to losing in the final, Portugal also lost in the tournament's first match. To the extent that these defeats reflected the negative aspects of home crowd support, augmented by pressure of national expectations, Portugal's performances may be viewed as exhibiting a particular form of the “home-field disadvantage” effect identified by Benjafield, Liddell, and Benjafield (1989). See Courneya and Carron (1992), Carron, Loughead, and Bray (2005) and Carmichael and Thomas (2005b) for reviews of the literature on the home-field effect.

8. The number of observations is limited but the sample is fully representative of the teams that competed in the tournament.

9. Torgler (2004) explicitly investigates the influence of refereeing decisions in the FIFA World Cup 2002 tournament.

10. While player injuries and suspensions can affect outcomes of individual matches in any sporting competition, the knock-on effects for further matches are more pronounced in concentrated team tournaments of the EURO 2004 form.

11. This point was drawn to our attention by an anonymous referee who provided some performance figures for Greece to illustrate contextual change during the EURO 2004 tournament. Overall, Greece had eight shots per match, of which half were on target, but in the group stage they averaged ten shots per match, of which 30% were on target, while in knock-out match performance they averaged only six shots per match, of which two-thirds were accurate, enough to win each of the QF, SF and final by a 1–0 margin. However, in terms of limiting shots on goal by opposition teams, there appeared to be no real difference in Greece's performance between group and knock-out stages, with the total shots and shots on target (against) averages being sixteen and fifteen, and five and five, respectively.

12. In his Soccerphile ( 2004 ) profile of Otto Rehhagel, the German-born manager of the Greek national team, Ozren Podnar concludes that “… Rehhagel made Greece better than the sum of individual elements and utterly deserved the joy of watching his disciples overcome individually stronger sides like Portugal, Spain, France and the Czechs (sic)”. As a postscript to this paper it is notable that Greece failed to reach the finals of the 2006 FIFA World Cup tournament, but have recently qualified for EURO 2008, having retained their EURO 2004 winning manager.