It doesn't seem true to me that I can talk about football (and not about work or the economy) with a labor economist! But joking aside, where did your decision to apply rigorous economic methods to football come from?
It may seem strange that an economist is interested in football. In fact, there are various reasons why other economists, before me, have devoted themselves to studying this sport, although from an industrial point of view it has a relatively marginal importance. The main reason is that football catalyzes one of the scarcest resources in the world, namely human attention, and right now few other things do it so well. In the age of the Internet we are constantly bombarded with all sorts of messages, having access to countless sources of information.
In this forest of stimuli, football manages to exert a strong appeal, attracting the attention of many individuals. I'll just mention one fact: the 2010 World Cup final was followed by around 200 million people in 700 countries. It is a resource that other human activities simply cannot catalyze. Perhaps because football arouses in us primordial instincts, dormant rivalries: the fact is that football captures human attention and, as such, deserves great attention from those who, like the economist, study the allocation of scarce resources. (…)
Before diving into the story of the Calciopoli events, I'd like to ask you where the idea of applying economic tools to those events came from.
In June 2006 we were all waiting for the World Cup to start, when the first revelations about the phone calls between Luciano Moggi and some Serie A referees began to arrive.
The investigators had tapped the phones of some managers during an investigation into the use of doping in Juventus. They discovered that the director general of Juve, Luciano Moggi, had exerted pressure on referees, federation officials and journalists, on the eve of decisive matches of Juventus itself or some of its rivals. At the time the referees were selected by a team of former referees called "designators", with whom Moggi used to hold long telephone conversations, although this was expressly forbidden by the federation's rules. The investigation was immediately extended to all designators and managers who called them in violation of federal rules. At that time I was reading a work by Steve Levitt (known for his freakonomics) who could identify rigged school exams by looking at deviations from a typical grade distribution.
Some have denigrated these techniques as the "economy of the imagination" because they make inferences about phenomena that cannot be observed. But the method has often proved to be very effective in reporting possible episodes of corruption; in our case, we had the advantage of knowing from interceptions which games had been manipulated. At that time I had begun to collect data on the productivity of football players. The fundamental characteristic of sports data (a rare case in the labor market) is in fact that they allow the productivity of football players to be measured with relative precision: through various indicators, such as the number of goals and corners, fouls committed and suffered, as well as saves, penalties and kilometers travelled, it is possible to have a fairly precise estimate of how much each individual player can "produce".
Well, when the first episodes of Calciopoli came to light, I asked a Battista Severgnini, with which I was collecting this data on the productivity of football players, if we could not direct our efforts on the analysis of these episodes of corruption that were beginning to surface. So we decided to methodically analyze the case of Calciopoli, trying to understand how widespread corruption is in Italian football.
And we discovered some very interesting things. This investigation allowed us to understand that the way in which the results of the matches were altered was very subtle: the referees were not paid, but very strong pressure was exerted on them when they were in a particularly delicate phase of their career, waiting to be promoted to the status of international arbitrators. Faced with the alternative of working with unprincipled managers or not making the career leap, some referees (who happened to be in that position) chose the former option. Our studies show that it is precisely the referees at this crucial stage in their careers who have been involved in the matches under investigation. But to appreciate the merits of these analyses, it is necessary to understand how the corruption system that had crystallized around the referees in the years preceding the explosion of Calciopoli worked.
(…) What conclusions can be drawn about Italian football from your analysis of the Calciopoli events?
I would indicate two. Firstly, in Italy the football competition is distorted by the pre-eminence of the media power, which affects sporting and economic power and distorts its dynamics. Secondly, those who had to regulate the system, i.e. the triad that selected the arbitrators, and the arbitrators themselves, have been systematically captured by those who had to be regulated. To try to remedy this specific problem, it is necessary to intervene on the incentives of arbitration careers and further enhance the fixed fees. Above all, it is necessary for an authority outside the world of football to monitor the activity of match officials and evaluate their performance. One of the flaws in our football was (and is) the lack of adequate players external controls. (...)
What needs to be done to prevent new Calciopoli from happening again in the future?
It is one of the questions that guided our analysis. From a regulatory point of view, our results suggest that to reduce the risk of new Calciopoli it is necessary closely monitor the behavior of the referees, especially those who are going through a crucial stage in their careers. More generally, it serves greater transparency in at least three areas: firstly, in decisions relating to match assignments to referees; secondly in the promotion of the latter to the international rank; third, in the official assessments of performance of the referees. Improving their compensation system can serve to discourage the use of match officials to manipulate matches. (…)
Whose responsibility is it to implement these reforms?
A little to the federation, a little to the government. But it is a thankless task and, at least in the short term, unpopular, because in Italy football teams, in addition to being too popular to fail, are sacred institutions that no one can touch, where parochialism by definition prevails. Politics need to tie their hands like Ulysses, because what is needed are not minimal adjustments, but reforms and interventions that drastically reduce the number of teams, forcing those that are unable to present a serious budget to to close the doors. Again, it should radiate for life those who have committed unlawful acts and those who have given them cover. Maybe we need one technical government also in football to do these things. We must not forget that in addition to the public good (football) we must protect the public of fans.
Yes, and the current football governance doesn't take them into consideration at all. We need figures who truly represent the interests of football fans. We need a "good fan" card: I'm not talking about the fan card introduced by ex-minister Maroni, which soon turned out to be a sort of card for organized groups; but of a card for individual fans who go peacefully to the stadium (such as the fidelity card proposed by Minister Cancellieri). This tile should allow supporters to elect their own representatives in football governance structures that must ensure compliance with sporting rules.
Because it is true, as is sometimes said, that individuals can always vote with their feet, in this case by ceasing to go to the stadium or by no longer watching the matches on television, but it is good that they also make their voices heard. A recent econometric study by Babatunde Buraimo, Giuseppe Migli and Rob Simmons (with the eloquent title Corruption Does Not Pay) shows that after Calciopoli the teams that had been involved in episodes of corruption suffered substantial losses of stadium spectators. Unfortunately, the disappointment of spectators who stop going to the stadium risks going unnoticed, because stadium revenues occupy a small slice of the turnover of Italian teams. If we forced football clubs to have more transparent budgets, pushing them to reduce the share of television rights, even the reactions of spectators to corruption would serve as a disciplinary device: at that point the clubs would pay the price. Going in this direction, having more expensive tickets would be a price worth paying.
