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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Behav. Econ.
Sec. Behavioral Microfoundations
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frbhe.2024.1490871
This article is part of the Research Topic Sports, Economics, and Natural Experiments: Advances and Retrospection View all 6 articles

Do Sports Analytics Affect Footballer Pay?

Provisionally accepted
David M Butler David M Butler 1,2*Alex Farnell Alex Farnell 3Robert Simmons Robert Simmons 1,4
  • 1 University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
  • 2 Centre for Sports Economics & Law, Cork, Ireland
  • 3 Maynooth University, Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland
  • 4 Lancaster University, Lancaster, England, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Labour economists aspire to understand how workers' productivity impacts pay. While professional football is a well-established domain to explore this relationship, so far, research has relied on basic productivity measures. Football is now awash with advanced and granular performance metrics that can allow a deeper understanding of the pay-performance relationship. We specify a salary model considering the newly available data and use sophisticated performance measures to explain contracted salaries in the English Premier League and Italian Serie A. We make a methodological breakthrough by identifying a sample of players who are in the first year of a new contract only. This results in a much tighter relationship between pay and performance. We estimate different salary equations using both basic and advanced performance statistics. Our main findings are, first, that few of our advanced performance metrics help to explain player salary and, second, that there is misalignment between individual performance determinants of team points and player salaries.

    Keywords: Salary, Sports analytics, Football, Soccer, Contracts

    Received: 03 Sep 2024; Accepted: 14 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Butler, Farnell and Simmons. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: David M Butler, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.