The impact of participation in pan-European competition on domestic performance in association football

ABSTRACT

Research question: This paper empirically examines whether participation in the group stage of the UEFA Europa League has a causal impact on the performance of teams in national leagues. An appropriate methodology is adopted to address the selection bias that arises because Europa League participants tend to be stronger than other teams in their league due to the qualification criteria for pan-European competition.

Research methods: Longitudinal data is used consisting of European teams in the top division of their country’s national league in the period 2009–10 to 2017–18. In order to address the selection bias, the regression discontinuity design estimator is employed.

Results and findings: The results show no statistically significant effect from participation in the Europa League group stage on performance in national leagues for teams from stronger leagues but a positive and statistically significant effect for teams from weaker leagues.

Implications: The results suggest that the knowledge gained and/or the financial benefits from group stage participation outweigh any negative effects arising from the travel and additional games required by participation in the group stages of the Europa League in weaker leagues. They are therefore supportive of increasing the share of UEFA competition revenues given to non-participating clubs in order to mitigate the negative effect of these competitions on domestic competitive balance.

KEYWORDS:

• Association football
• pan-European competition
• regression discontinuity design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A related question that has recently been addressed by Green, Lozano, and Simmons (2015) is whether an increase in the probability of participation in pan-European competition leads teams to exert greater effort in domestic competition. This paper differs from that approach in seeking to establish whether participation is actually beneficial in terms of improving performance in domestic competition.

2 The previous season’s winner also qualifies automatically but in only one season (2012-13) in the period under consideration has the club that won the Champions’ League failed to qualify by virtue of its league position.

3 For example, in 2016-17, the English teams finishing fifth and sixth in the national league entered the Europa League at the group stage and the team that finished seventh entered at the third qualifying round. By contrast, all three qualifiers from Northern Ireland entered at the first round.

4 Competitiveness here refers to the difficulty of acquiring points for member teams. It is therefore concerned with the distribution of team quality within a league rather than the quality of the league relative to other leagues.

5 If league position was the only way of qualifying for the Europa League and there were no qualifying rounds, it would fully determine group stage participation and the gap at the cutoff shown in the graphs on the right-hand side of Figure 1 would show the estimated effect of group stage participation (as in a sharp regression discontinuity design). In a fuzzy regression discontinuity design with no covariates, the gap represents the reduced form estimate, which is rescaled to calculate the estimated treatment effect by dividing by the first-stage estimate to reflect the non-deterministic relationship between league position and group stage participation. The first-stage estimate is represented by the gap at the cutoff shown in the graphs on the left-hand side of Figure 1.