The Political Economy of Football: Democracy, Income Inequality, and Men’s National Football Rankings

The question as to why certain countries outperform others in international football games warrants exploration. Herein, we argue that the synergy of economic development, democratic experience, duration of football associations, and low-income inequality improves the performance of men’s national football teams. Contemporary professional football is a typical “club good” that encourages members to take collective actions such as watching games, organizing associations, and investing in talent and capital for team success. We hypothesized that economic development sustains professional football, particularly in democratic regimes that allow for collective action through football associations. Wealthy democracies most effectively shape institutional incentives that improve the transparency, fairness, and competitiveness of leagues and contribute to their prosperity, which benefits the talent pool of national football teams. In addition, income inequality reduces national football performance. In this study, we used panel data from 121 countries for the 1999–2014 period as well as fixed-effects models to verify our hypotheses. The results show that a hundred units of democracy stock lead to a 0.145 natural logarithm FIFA score gain, as democracy stock exerted the most prominent effect on national football performance and additionally moderated the effects of long football association history to improve national football performance. A lower income inequality sequentially benefited to the performances.