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Markets misprice: fact.

Just look at the fact that some enormously overpaid footballers have been humiliated over the last couple of weeks by a succession of teams staffed by people who are paid less.

Quite:

English top flight clubs spent in excess of £1.32billion on employee salaries – more than Italy’s Serie A (£0.93bn), Spain’s La Liga (£800m), the Bundesliga (£684m) and France’s Lique 1 (£615m).

Not that I can see any direct link between club wage bills and national team success really.

8 thoughts on “Well, yes”

  1. You can always count on Ritchie to miss the point.

    There are two separate scenarios that he’s addressing:

    1) Club football, where market forces play a large part in allocating players to teams.

    2) International football, where players are allocated to teams on the basis of nationality, with market forces being almost non-existent.

    The fact that high paid players perform better for club than country would tend to indicate, if anything, that market forces are allocating valuable resources effectively.

  2. It has been shown that club wage bills are highly correlated with club success. (Size of transfer fees paid appears to show very little correlation with club success, incidentally). Given that most top clubs have many foreign players though, it is hard to see why there would be much correlation between wages in a national league and performance of the national team in that same nation. The more efficient the market, the less correlation I would expect to see.

    It might be interesting to add up the total wages paid to the players for each national side by their clubs and see how correlated that is with national team success. (My guess would be strongly correlated, although the difference between the correlation with club and national team performance might tell you something interesting, probably that players perform better for the people paying their wages).

  3. Problem is that the highly capitalist Premier League furnished a load of players who did n’t look fit in the World Cup. Rooney is calling for a mid season break and no wonder.Jurgen Klinsman could n’t understand when playing for Spurs why he had to turn out on Boxing Day.Money, mate.
    The most lack-lustre performances came from the most capitalist outfits :Man U, Chelsea.
    And then we had the right-wing panacea: strong management.In England’s case this meant an arrogant cadre of Italians with ,in Fabio’s case , an increasingly shaky grasp of English after boasts that he could learn the language in no time .(Yeah if you wanted to come across like Chico Marx .There’s Karl Marxism and the more entertaining Groucho Marxism.We get Chico Marxism.)
    I am waiting for the inevitable scapegoating of the public sector for all this.This will stretch the imaginations of the most dedicated Ayn Rand fans.

  4. Teams in the European Cup final, past 10 seasons:

    English clubs: 6
    Italian: 5
    Spanish: 4
    German: 3
    French: 1

    So total wages in the domestic league correlates quite well with success against other European clubs, at least.

  5. Not that I can see any direct link between club wage bills and national team success really.

    I think Richie’s argument only begins to look sensible if one confines the analysis to a select dataset and assumes players of nationality A only ever play for clubs in Country A.

    Take the Ghanains for example. Last time I looked they were doing beter than France and could even do better than England. Now, I’m guessing but I think it would be fair to assume the average wage bill at Heart of Lions or Bechem Chelsea wouldn’t even cover Beckham’s monthly bill for haircare products. Sadly this has about as much bearing on the discussion as my shoe size since of the Ghanian squad only three play for Ghanian sides, most of the rest play in Europe.

  6. @chris white – excellent list!!

    Pretty much shoots down the complaint. So re the original article – dont let the facts get in the way of a good rant.

  7. “The fact that high paid players perform better for club than country would tend to indicate, if anything, that market forces are allocating valuable resources effectively.”

    But if all clubs are crap and therefore crap players can look good against other crap players, then the fact that they are highly paid means that the clubs are paying over the odds for their players.

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