Meritocracy or Bias? The Determinants of Leadership Selection in Professional Football
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Abstract
This paper investigates the determinants of team captain selection in professional football using a dataset of 1.9 million player-match observations from the 2018-2024 seasons across 34 countries. Employing logit models with team-season fixed effects, we find strong evidence of nationality-based discrimination: foreign players are 71.7% less likely to be selected as captain compared to native players with equivalent performance characteristics. This penalty is remarkably robust across specifications and particularly pronounced in elite leagues. The findings reveal persistent barriers to leadership roles for immigrant workers even in highly competitive, performance-driven environments where meritocratic principles presumably prevail.
JEL Classification: J71, J24, M51, Z22
Keywords: Leadership selection, Labour market discrimination, Immigration, Team captains
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How to Cite
Koçsoy, A. (2025) “Meritocracy or Bias? The Determinants of Leadership Selection in Professional Football”, World Journal of Applied Economics, 11(2), pp. 63-77. doi: 10.22440/wjae.11.2.1.
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Research Articles
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References
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Oreopoulos, P. (2011). Why do skilled immigrants struggle in the labor market? A field experiment with thirteen thousand resumes. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 3 (4), 148-171. doi:10.1257/pol.3.4.148
Palacios-Huerta, I. (2025). The beautiful dataset. Journal of Economic Literature, Forthcoming.
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Post, C., & Byron, K. (2015). Women on boards and firm financial performance: A meta-analysis. Academy of Management Journal, 58 (5), 1546-1571. doi:10.5465/amj.2013.0319
Price, J., & Wolfers, J. (2010). Racial discrimination among NBA referees. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 125 (4), 1859-1887. doi:10.1162/qjec.2010.125.4.1859
Szymanski, S. (2000). A market test for discrimination in the English professional soccer leagues. Journal of Political Economy, 108 (3), 590-603. doi:10.1086/262130
Szymanski, S. (2003). The economic design of sporting contests. Journal of Economic Literature, 41 (4), 1137-1187. doi:10.1257/jel.41.4.1137
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S.Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (p. 33-47). Brooks/Cole.
Zweigenhaft, R. L., & Domhoff, G. W. (2011). The new CEOs: Women, African American, Latino, and Asian American leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Akresh, I. R. (2008). Occupational trajectories of legal US immigrants: Downgrading and recovery. Population and Development Review, 34 (3), 435-456. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2008.00231.x
Albrecht, J., Bjorklund, A., & Vroman, S. (2003). Is there a glass ceiling in Sweden? Journal of Labor Economics, 21 (1), 145-177. doi:10.1086/344126
Arrow, K. J. (1973). The theory of discrimination. In O. Ashenfelter & A. Rees (Eds.), Discrimination in labor markets (p. 3-33). Princeton University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x10hs.
Arulampalam, W., Booth, A. L., & Bryan, M. L. (2007). Is there a glass ceiling over Europe? Exploring the gender pay gap across the wage distribution. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 60 (2), 163-186. doi:10.1177/001979390706000201
Baxter, J., & Wright, E. O. (2000). The glass ceiling hypothesis: A comparative study of the United States, Sweden, and Australia. Gender & Society, 14 (2), 275-294. doi:10.1177/089124300014002004
Becker, G. S. (1971). The economics of discrimination (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo22415931.html.
Bertrand, M., & Hallock, K. F. (2001). The gender gap in top corporate jobs. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 55 (1), 3-21. doi:10.1177/001979390105500101
Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94 (4), 991-1013. doi:10.1257/0002828042002561
Blau, F. D., & Kahn, L. M. (2017). The gender wage gap: Extent, trends, and explanations. Journal of Economic Literature, 55 (3), 789-865. doi:10.1257/jel.20160995
Borjas, G. J. (1994). The economics of immigration. Journal of Economic Literature, 32 (4), 1667-1717.
Borjas, G. J. (1999). The economic analysis of immigration. In O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (Eds.), Handbook of Labor Economics (Vol. 3, p. 1697-1760). Elsevier. doi:10.1016/S1573-4463(99)03009-6
Byrne, D. (1971). The attraction paradigm. Academic Press.
Card, D. (2005). Is the new immigration really so bad? Economic Journal, 115 (507), F300-F323. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2005.01037.x
Cotter, D. A., Hermsen, J. M., Ovadia, S., & Vanneman, R. (2001). The glass ceiling effect. Social Forces, 80 (2), 655-681. doi:10.1353/sof.2001.0091
Cotterill, S., & Fransen, K. (2016). Athlete leadership in sport teams: Current understanding and future directions. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 9 (1), 116-133. doi:10.1080/1750984X.2015.1124443
Ely, R. J., & Thomas, D. A. (2001). Cultural diversity at work: The effects of diversity perspectives on work group processes and outcomes. Administrative Science Quarterly, 46 (2), 229-273. doi:10.2307/2667087
Fransen, K., Vanbeselaere, N., De Cuyper, B., Vande Broek, G., & Boen, F. (2014). The myth of the team captain as principal leader: Extending the athlete leadership classification within sport teams. Journal of Sports Sciences, 32 (14), 1389-1397. doi:10.1080/02640414.2014.891291
Gould, E. D., & Winter, E. (2009). Interactions between workers and the technology of production: Evidence from professional baseball. Review of Economics and Statistics, 91 (1), 188-200. doi:10.1162/rest.91.1.188
Guryan, J., & Charles, K. K. (2013). Taste-based or statistical discrimination: The economics of discrimination returns to its roots. Economic Journal, 123 (572), F417-F432. doi:10.1111/ecoj.12080
Ingersoll, A. R., Glass, C., Cook, A., & Olsen, K. J. (2019). Power, status and expectations: How narcissism manifests among women CEOs. Journal of Business Ethics, 158 (4), 893-907. doi:10.1007/s10551-017-3730-0
Jewell, R. T., Simmons, R., & Szymanski, S. (2014). Bad for business? The effects of hooliganism on English professional football clubs. Journal of Sports Economics, 15 (5), 429-450. doi:10.1177/1527002514535169
Kahane, L., Longley, N., & Simmons, R. (2013). The effects of coworker heterogeneity on firm-level output: Assessing the impacts of cultural and language diversity in the National Hockey League. Review of Economics and Statistics, 95 (1), 302-314. doi:10.1162/REST a 00221
Kahn, L. M. (2000). The sports business as a labor market laboratory. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14 (3), 75-94. doi:10.1257/jep.14.3.75
Kerr, S. P., Kerr, W., Ozden, C., & Parsons, C. (2016). Global talent flows. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30 (4), 83-106. doi:10.1257/jep.30.4.83
Kocsoy, A. (2024). Captains vs. All-Stars: Who makes better leaders? Plos One, 19 (11), e0309374. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0309374
Maderer, D., Holtbrugge, D., & Schuster, T. (2014). Professional football squads as multicultural teams: Cultural diversity, intercultural experience, and team performance. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 14 (2), 215-238. doi:10.1177/1470595813510710
Oreopoulos, P. (2011). Why do skilled immigrants struggle in the labor market? A field experiment with thirteen thousand resumes. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 3 (4), 148-171. doi:10.1257/pol.3.4.148
Palacios-Huerta, I. (2025). The beautiful dataset. Journal of Economic Literature, Forthcoming.
Parsons, C. A., Sulaeman, J., Yates, M. C., & Hamermesh, D. S. (2011). Strike three: Discrimination, incentives, and evaluation. American Economic Review, 101 (4), 1410-1435. doi:10.1257/aer.101.4.1410
Post, C., & Byron, K. (2015). Women on boards and firm financial performance: A meta-analysis. Academy of Management Journal, 58 (5), 1546-1571. doi:10.5465/amj.2013.0319
Price, J., & Wolfers, J. (2010). Racial discrimination among NBA referees. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 125 (4), 1859-1887. doi:10.1162/qjec.2010.125.4.1859
Szymanski, S. (2000). A market test for discrimination in the English professional soccer leagues. Journal of Political Economy, 108 (3), 590-603. doi:10.1086/262130
Szymanski, S. (2003). The economic design of sporting contests. Journal of Economic Literature, 41 (4), 1137-1187. doi:10.1257/jel.41.4.1137
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S.Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (p. 33-47). Brooks/Cole.
Zweigenhaft, R. L., & Domhoff, G. W. (2011). The new CEOs: Women, African American, Latino, and Asian American leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.