Racism and Soccer

Last week, I finally read Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s Soccernomics. Like Freakonomics, the book is a collaborative effort between a journalist and an economist that popularizes economic analysis of some (really very important) aspect of social life: soccer. Part of the book is soccer’s Moneyball: an attempt to show how smart use of soccer statistics can help one make better decisions about soccer; such as what players to acquire and sell. The other part is more like Freakonomics: an attempt to use economic analysis of soccer as a way to understand broader social phenomena, much like the soccer and civil war paper I blogged about earlier.

For anyone who enjoys soccer and has an interest in social science, the book is a delightful read (although I inevitably have some gripes). Over the next few days, I plan to write a few blogs about some of the issues tackled in the book that may be of interest to Monkey Cage readers. I start with their analysis of racism in hiring soccer players and coaches.

Racism in soccer has been much more overt until much later than in American sports. As late as the early 1990s, it was quite common for black players to have bananas thrown at them during games. There were many teams that simply refused to hire black players. These decisions were generally motivated by arguments that black players “lacked bottle” or were not able to “read the game” as well as white players. These things still happen, especially in parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, but it is much less common now and it is often accompanied with some opprobrium.

Szymanski had found in earlier research that salaries were strongly correlated with the performance level of English soccer teams. He then found that controlling for salaries, teams with fewer black players did worse than clubs with more black players, suggesting that teams were overpaying mediocre white players at the expense of more qualified blacks. This result, however, went away when he limited the analysis to the latter half of the 1990s. This is consistent with studies of American sports: after a brief period in which teams underhire and underpay racial minorities, they catch up. So, in this case, the market works.

Kuper and Szymanski sensibly argue that this finding does not reflect the disappearance of racial stereotypes but the brutal honesty of sports. In sports, results count and each individual’s contribution to those results is measurable. It is difficult to disguise mediocrity. This is not so in most other professions, including managing and coaching sports teams. Consequentially, racial minorities have made far fewer strides in acquiring managerial positions, not just in soccer but also in many other sports. So, more often than not, the market will not get rid of the social and economic inefficiencies caused by racial stereotypes.

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