Player Productivity and Performance: An Econometric Approach to Team Management in Soccer

Abstract

The motivation for this thesis concerns worker productivity as estimated from production functions. Identifying worker contributions allows for not just an understanding of economic theory but highlights ways in which business management and strategy can be more efficient. The setting for these analyses is professional soccer, where teams are analogous to businesses and workers are multi-million dollar assets in the form of players. Most of a soccer team’s income is tied to its success on the field and so a careful management of staff and players is necessary to their business potential. Sports are the perfect “laboratory” to study economic theory since workers can be observed on a regular basis and there is a large volume of existing data. With almost every game recorded in the modern age this allows for the opportunity to analyse not just worker productivity but also team processes and strategies. This thesis expands the production function literature using a framework from contest theory literature. Most research in soccer focuses on performance at the aggregate level while this thesis primarily considers performance at the player level. It consists of three papers, each providing a different insight into player productivity. Chapter I presents a brief introduction of the relevant literature and contextualizes the research. Chapter II measures the impact of different workers in a production process depending on their expected productivity, finding support for superstar theories over the O-Ring theory in the English Premier League. Chapter III looks at the effects of fatigue in professional soccer finding that under current scheduling in the English Premier League and European competition there are no statistically significant effects of receiving different days of rest on team performance. Chapter IV applies high dimensional techniques to European soccer data to predict match outcomes. The models perform almost as well and betting firms and can be used to estimate individual player contributions in the form of rankings. Chapter V concludes.