https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7281-5212
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ABSTRACT
Research question
Despite the potential importance of awards as a possible career catalyst, research on awards is still in its infancy, specifically in sports management. Here, we address this shortcoming in the sports economics and management literature by exploring data from youth association football.
Research methods
Estimating different probit regression models, we analyze whether an early career award, the so-called Fritz Walter Medal, significantly affects the awardee’s career trajectory in a highly competitive environment, i.e. German youth football, where performance differences are often still hardly perceivable.
Results and Findings
We find that receiving an award seems, per se, to be a robust positive signal for a player’s future career success. Intriguingly, though, both the award characteristics and the awardee’s age only add limited explanatory power.
Implications
Our empirical results indicate that winning a prestigious award can represent a reliable status-oriented signal for individuals, especially young gifted talents entering highly competitive job markets.
Acknowledgments
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Availability of data
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Exploiting sports (data) as a lab for analyzing research questions where industry data is scarce has a long history, primarily for better understanding labor markets (e.g. Bar-Eli et al., Citation2020). For instance, Deutscher et al. (Citation2020) use football data to explore the role of a talent’s firm choice and subsequent career success. Others have employed such data to study phenomena such as career choices (e.g. Schmidt et al., Citation2017), discrimination (e.g. Szymanski, Citation2000), organizational identification (e.g. Bergmann et al., Citation2016), promotion decisions (e.g. Kassis et al., Citation2017), or social pressure (e.g. Bryson et al., Citation2021) in the workplace.
2 As one reviewer has rightfully pointed out, controlling for such individual performance measures, likely correlated with both receiving the award and the subsequent performance, is essential to isolate the effect of receiving an award.
3 According to Gambetta (Citation2009), signals are an actor’s actions purposefully taken to change another actor’s beliefs. In contrast, he defines signs as anything in the environment that, once perceived, can change an actor’s beliefs.
4 According to Pearce (Citation2011), there is extensive documentation that an actor’s relatively higher social status leads to assumptions by others that the actor is competent and a high performer.
5 Parsing out the identity-based signaling advantages of status, authors operating in the field of organizational management have recently begun demonstrating that at least some of the benefits enjoyed by high-status actors stem from mere perceptions rather than actual differences in quality (e.g. Simcoe & Waguespack, Citation2011).
6 Henceforth, by using the term award, we refer to discretionary awards bestowed by a third-party organization.
7 According to Nippa (Citation2011), two preconditions characterize an organizational setting as competitive: (1) high-ranking owners receive abnormal rents compared to low-status actors, and (2) there is an ongoing struggle for positions among group members. Both preconditions apply to our setting.
8 Even if a Bundesliga club’s youth academy recruits a player, the probability of further progressing to the first team is appreciably low at about 5 percent (Schmidt & Weiss, Citation2010). Thus, only a small elite circle of exceptional young players ultimately become professional football players in one of the most prestigious leagues worldwide.
9 Extracted from transfermarkt.com in June 2022, our initial data set includes 5,520 players who made their U19 Bundesliga debut between the eight seasons and contains complete career information until the end of the season 2021-22. Because we measure a player’s career success through several dependent variables, including whether he appeared in either the Germany national Under-21 (U21) football team or even the Germany national football (DFB) team, however, we excluded all foreign players.
10 Based on our data, we find that the youngest 1% of players made their debut in U19 Bundesliga at the age of 16, while among those who made it to one of the Big Five leagues, the oldest 95th percentile debut age is 27. Except for one of those 45 FWM players progressing to one of the Big Five leagues, all FWM players made their league debut before turning 23.
11 In Table A1, we show the complete tabulation of U19 debutants who have subsequently appeared in the Bundesliga.
12 Unfortunately, this information is missing for roughly 40% of non-FWM players, reducing the sample size further. Arguably, players with missing information on preferred foot or height are less likely to be comparable to FWM awardees. For instance, compared to those with complete information records, these players played significantly fewer games and minutes, though not minutes per game, in U19 and were less likely to appear in playoffs.
13 We further test the robustness of the results by introducing position-specific performance interaction terms or using the subcomponent of each performance as control variables (e.g. examining a non-goalkeeper sample). It does not qualitatively nor quantitively change the estimated effect of FWM from the more parsimonious model. In fact, the parsimonious model is deemed to be a better model according to AIC and BIC. In addition, subsample analysis using specific playing positions agrees with the main results.
14 In subsequent analyses, we also explore the effect of FWM on career success in terms of total appearances and timing of entry. In Table A4, we present the summary of all dependent variables employed in this study and show the difference between FWM awardees and other players.
15 Nevertheless, an increased administrative distance to Germany is associated with a lower probability of DFB selection. More interestingly, when restricting the sample to players with migration backgrounds, we note that cultural and administrative distances to Germany negatively correlate to Bundesliga and Big Five debuts. In contrast, geographic and administrative distances are negatively correlated to DFB selection.
16 Using per-game rather than per-minute performance metrics and historical Bundesliga affiliation return near identical results.
17 For instance, some could interpret the number of yellow cards conceived as a signal of toughness.
18 Of all 399 players who made it to the Bundesliga, 55 (13.8%) have only made one game appearance per season.
19 These results are highly robust to excluding those 30 players whose latest market value equals their peak market value.
20 We implement PSM with replacement as it increases the quality of matching (Abadie & Imbens, Citation2006).
21 We perform both pairwise comparison of estimated effects between the three ranks and a F-test on the equivalence of the coefficients.
22 Additionally, players who were awarded the FWM bronze medal are not statistically significantly more likely to be selected in the DFB national team.