CONVERGENCE AND SOCCER:
FEATURES
This paper has shown that there is evidence of unconditional convergence in the results of international soccer
teams over the last six decades. This contrasts with the
evidence of convergence in national income, where unconditional convergence is not observed. It would, of course,
be foolish to expect that the results of competition in soccer
would operate in the same way as the growth of GDP, but
nonetheless one can speculate that there are factors which
might facilitate convergence in soccer competition which
are absent in many other economic spheres.
Summer 2014 • H A R V A R D I N T E R N A T I O N A L R E V I E W
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C onvergence
Implications and Conclusion
Soccer is played in a highly competitive international
arena, and so teams are able to learn from the performance of their rivals. Generally one might expect to see
convergence in sectors which produce internationally
traded goods (Rodrik advances this argument) but less so
in sectors which do not. Although national team play is
popular, club soccer played in domestic leagues is even
more popular, and the top players are internationally mobile. This means that athletes from all countries can learn
to play at the highest level and, often, repatriate some of
the skills they have learned. Soccer players are also better
able to appropriate the returns from their investment.
Appropriability, meaning the capacity of those who invest
to obtain their return, is often a problem in developing
countries because of bureaucracy and corruption (others
appropriate the investment returns, thus diminishing the
incentive to invest in the first place). This can amount
to a form of theft, and investors may be in a very weak
position to prevent this from happening. Since soccer
players usually carry high status at home and abroad, the
appropriability problem tends to be less severe.
From a different perspective, FIFA, the world governing body, long ago adopted an explicit policy of allocating more places in competitions to teams from weaker
federations than would be justified purely on sporting
m