Location, Location, Location: Why Some Leagues Import More Players - Wealth, Democracy, Or Good Weather?

Here's a follow-up to an earlier post where I looked at the connection between a league's quality and its level of player imports. There is a positive correlation: the better leagues import a higher percentage of footballers. But there also are some notable outliers, especially Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. Perhaps their levels of imports are higher than the league quality would warrant because clubs in these leagues are willing to overpay for talent - to get high quality players who also could ply their trade in a better league, clubs need to pay a premium. Or perhaps there's something else that makes them attractive leagues. But what?

The correlation between league quality and imports implies that the best players will seek to play in the best leagues, but the outliers show that some players are apparently willing to make trade-offs (like we all do), maybe to forego a little bit of league quality for a little more (or a lot more) money (or something else). So the best clubs (and leagues) will have an easier time recruiting talent because they are inherently more attractive places to work for ambitious players, but there are only so many opportunities to play in the Premier League and players have to earn a living somewhere. 

Assuming there is a true global market for the best talent, is there anything else about a particular country that helps attract more (of the best) players? I thought I'd take a look at three factors: how wealthy a country is, how democratic it is, and where it is.

Why would these factors matter?

Wealth and democracy are proxies for a whole lot of things. For starters, life in Ireland or the Netherlands is a whole lot nicer than life in Belarus, not because of the weather (Dublin can probably match Minsk for rain), but because these are countries where things work; where the showers work in the locker room, where you can live in decent accommodations, eat decent food, and where you can send your kids to decent schools. These are things that a country's wealth will buy you. 

And, by the way, democracy isn't so bad either. It's nice to live in a place where you can say what you want and no one will really care (well, except for those tweets you're not supposed to tweet). And more democratic countries tend to be less corrupt so you don't have to pay a bribe to get a driver's license. 

Finally, what about location, location, location? Do more southern leagues have an easier time attracting players? You can imagine that South American players, for example, but perhaps Swedes, too, prefer to play where you don't need a shovel and an ice scraper to leave your house six months out of the year, and where the lifestyle is a little more relaxed?

So the question is this: is there a connection between wealth, democracy, latitude, and player imports?

To get a handle on this, I added data about GDP per capita (a common measure of a country's wealth), freedom (the Freedom House score, which ranges from 1 = free to 3 = not free), and latitude to the dataset on player imports. Here's what we see when we plot levels of imports by wealth, freedom, and latitude (I've superimposed a regression line to help orient you).

There does seem to be a positive connection between wealth and imports; leagues in wealthier countries attract more imports. But the data show no connection between freedom and imports. Perhaps players just aren't political and don't care about whether people are treated equally before the law or because they occupy special positions in any society they become part of (they can afford the bribe for the driver's license, or they get one without a bribe). But of course some of this effect is purely statistical: the vast majority of countries included in the data are free, so there is very little variation on this score. Finally, imports look to be slightly higher, the further south you go on the map.

But back to wealth and weather: while it they are statistically significant predictors of levels of imports by themselves (in a regression format), the question is whether this effect persists once we control for league quality (in the form of the UEFA coefficient) and the other factors (does wealth still matter once we know what the climate is like, for example?). To answer this, I estimated a regression with level of imports as the dependent variable and league quality and country wealth as the independent variables.

Turns out, wealth matters. While league quality continues to be an overwhelmingly strong predictor along the lines of the original analysis, statistically and substantively (p<.000; two-tailed test), wealth shows up as well, though the effect is modest (p<.05; one-tailed test of significance). Controlling for a league's quality, moving from the poorest (Ukraine) to the richest country in our sample (Norway) would lead us to predict a change in the level of imports from 27% to 38%.

Do you want this?

What about latitude? It continues to matter as well (p<.05, two-tailed test), statistically speaking, and the effect is moderate in size. Going from Israel to Iceland means going from a 42.7% level of imports to 22.7% (all else equal - which of course it isn't, but we can pretend for statistical analyses).

So league quality matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. When it comes to importing the best players from around the world, countries that already have are able to get even more. Richer countries in warmer climates are better able to draw players. So who says footballers only care about league quality? Turns out they care about money and the weather, too.

Or this?