Examining the Relationship Between Nationality Diversity and Professional Soccer Team Performance

Abstract

This project examines whether professional soccer teams’ player nationality diversity is related to team performance. I look at the team performances and rosters of all teams in the top five revenue earning soccer leagues in the world, the English Premier League, the Spanish La Liga, the German Bundesliga, the Italian Serie A, and the French Ligue 1, and use an ordinary least squares regression to examine this relationship. My analysis also includes the control variable “team’s average player quality” to mitigate the occurrence of omitted variable bias. The results indicate that nationality diversity does not have a significant relationship with team performance in the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga, and Italian Serie A, but it has a weakly significant, slightly negative relationship with team performance in the French Ligue 1. The implications of my research are that it could demonstrate a new model for successful team composition and initiate a more cost effective way for team owners to engage in player transactions.