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Licence: CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Salary determination in professional football
T2 - empirical evidence from goalkeepers
AU - Berri, David
AU - Butler, David
AU - Rossi, Giambattista
AU - Simmons, Rob
AU - Tordoff, Conor
PY - 2023/1/29
Y1 - 2023/1/29
N2 - Research QuestionWe consider how elite European football clubs use available and measurable performance data to value personnel by focussing on the goalkeeper labour market. We test the determinants of goalkeeper pay and discuss if football clubs effectively separate goalkeeper performances from outfield players.Research MethodsMatching an exclusive salary dataset with rich performance measures, we estimate a Mincer-type salary model for a sample of 260 goalkeepers from five European football leagues (Premier League, Ligue 1, Bundesliga 1, Serie A and La Liga). Our dataset covers seven seasons from 2013/14 to 2019/20.Results and FindingsWe find that clubs use primitive defensive statistics to determine goalkeeper pay. Goalkeepers are paid based on co-production and team outcomes rather than individual workload. Also features of goalkeeper ball distribution positively affect salary - this indicates the importance of goalkeepers to initiating offensive moves.ImplicationsOur evidence suggests that decision-makers within clubs are not optimally decoupling individual performance from team qualities. As such, clubs could improve how they value a key team member. Identifying the failure to use advanced statistics is especially important as forming contracts in this setting is costly.
AB - Research QuestionWe consider how elite European football clubs use available and measurable performance data to value personnel by focussing on the goalkeeper labour market. We test the determinants of goalkeeper pay and discuss if football clubs effectively separate goalkeeper performances from outfield players.Research MethodsMatching an exclusive salary dataset with rich performance measures, we estimate a Mincer-type salary model for a sample of 260 goalkeepers from five European football leagues (Premier League, Ligue 1, Bundesliga 1, Serie A and La Liga). Our dataset covers seven seasons from 2013/14 to 2019/20.Results and FindingsWe find that clubs use primitive defensive statistics to determine goalkeeper pay. Goalkeepers are paid based on co-production and team outcomes rather than individual workload. Also features of goalkeeper ball distribution positively affect salary - this indicates the importance of goalkeepers to initiating offensive moves.ImplicationsOur evidence suggests that decision-makers within clubs are not optimally decoupling individual performance from team qualities. As such, clubs could improve how they value a key team member. Identifying the failure to use advanced statistics is especially important as forming contracts in this setting is costly.
KW - Goalkeeper
KW - perofrmance
KW - salary
KW - efficiency
U2 - 10.1080/16184742.2023.2169319
DO - 10.1080/16184742.2023.2169319
M3 - Journal article
JO - European Sport Management Quarterly
JF - European Sport Management Quarterly
SN - 1618-4742
ER -