Our blog will now take its customary Christmas break and return on Monday the 27th of January 2025.

We would like to wish all our readers a very Happy Christmas and best wishes for 2025.

By Robbie Butler

We are delighted to announce we have recently been published in Kyklos. Our paper - "The Baby Club: Paternity and Performance in a High-Pressure Setting" - attempts to understand worker performance before and after the birth of a child. Specifically, we look at male footballers and try to assess how child birth effects their performance on the pitch. 

Our paper offers new insights into fatherhood by asking if the onset of paternity changes workplace productivity. We do this in the well-monitored and high-pressure setting of professional football using a novel dataset that matches 115 birth disclosures to the performance of 96 players.

Our empirical approach involves specifying a performance equation for a suite of match-level performance statistics and estimating OLS and Poisson fixed-effect panel regressions. We find a negative correlation between fatherhood and collaborative performance as measured by expected assists—a player's ability to create goalscoring opportunities. We also report negative effects for the perinatal period for expected assists and passing measures.

There is no evidence of performance changes resulting from expectancy news. As negative performance effects are observed in a context of ‘superstar wages’, this raises concerns for high-pressure labour markets where workers are remunerated less but have low uptake of leave entitlements or where paternity leave is culturally taboo.

​The full paper, available in open access, can be found here.

By David Butler

This week a new paper of ours was published in Frontiers in Behavioral Economics as part of a Sports Economics special issue co-edited by Raphael Flepp, Romain Gauriot and Carl Singleton. 

With colleagues Alex Farnell and Rob Simmons, we ask if elite football clubs use advanced performance metrics to pay players? Given the data revolution that has occurred in football over the past years, one is left wondering if, or to what extent, metrics such as expected goals or expected assists etc. are used to determine contract awards. 

Using data from Capology and Fbref, our take-away message is that clubs are using very few of these advanced  statistics in salary negotiations. Based on the results, it seems plausible that executives use individual inputs to team output as a key determining factor in pay  - individual aspects of performance may treated as a black box so to speak and adding to team points may be the guiding metric. 

The full paper can be abstract here and the abstract is below

Abstract
"​Labor economists aspire to understand how workers' productivity impacts pay. While professional football is a well-established domain to explore this relationship, so far, research has relied on basic productivity measures. Football is now awash with advanced and granular performance metrics that can allow a deeper understanding of the pay-performance relationship. We specify a salary model considering the newly available data and use sophisticated performance measures to explain contracted salaries in the English Premier League and Italian Serie A. We make a methodological breakthrough by identifying a sample of players who are in the first year of a new contract only. This results in a much tighter relationship between pay and performance. We estimate different salary equations using both basic and advanced performance statistics. Our main findings are, first, that few of our advanced performance metrics help to explain player salary and, second, that there is misalignment between individual performance determinants of team points and player salaries."

By Robbie Butler

It has been interesting to read recently that IFAB, football’s custodians of the laws of the sport, are considering moves “to deal more effectively with goalkeepers who unfairly hold the ball for too long”. This statement appears in the 2024/25 Laws of the Game and seeks to target one of the most unapplied/broken rules, in my opinion, in the game.

What is more interesting is that goalkeepers holding the ball is currently covered by Law 12 – Fouls and Misconduct. The rule states that “An indirect free kick is awarded if a goalkeeper, inside their penalty area, commits any of the following offences: controls the ball with the hand/arm for more than six seconds before releasing it”.

Anyone that watches football will know this “six second rule”, introduced around 20 years ago (I think) is almost never applied. Prior to the introduction of the rule, goalkeepers would simply hold the ball for long periods of time. The final minutes of the 1992 UEFA European Championship Final between Denmark and Germany are a must-watch for those that want to witness how dreadful this, and the back-pass to the goalkeeper, were prior to important rule changes.

Goalkeepers were permitted to take 4 steps with the ball in hand. They would often then drop the ball, before picking it up again, to continue. This loophole was closed, but the steps rule remained. Timing was simply at the referee’s discretion.

This changed with the 6-second rule. But does this rule actually matter?

I recently watched an English Premier League game and counted to 34 seconds before the goalkeeper, who had caught a cross, decided to release the ball from his hands.

The question, for me at least, is why do referee’s ignore this formal rule? Will trialing a new punishment e.g. awarding a corner instead of an indirect free kick, increase application of this rule? Maybe, but why is the current punishment not applied?

Another interesting dynamic of this rule is that players rarely seek it’s application. For example, during the 34 seconds that the goalkeeper had the ball in his hands, not a single player visibly appealed for an indirect free kick to be awarded. They were instead happy to wait for the ball to return to play.