The Effect Assessments Of The "New Policies" In Chinese Professional Football Industry

In recent years,the State Council issued Some Opinions on Speeding up the Development of Sports Industry and Promoting Sports Consumption and The General Plan of China's Football Reform and Development.The Chinese professional football industry has rapidly developed to mature,but the national team's performance is still sluggish.In order to improve the performance of national team,China Football Association implements the "New Policy for U23 Players" and the "New Policy for Foreign Players" for professional leagues in season 2017.The "U23 New Policy" stipulates that the teams of Chinese Football Association Super League must have at least two U23 players in the players-list of the match,and at least one of them in the starting lineup.The "New Policy for Foreign Players" stipulates that the quantity of foreign players of a team decrease from 5 to 3 in a match.The policies distort the operation of clubs by increasing playing opportunities of young domestic players with lower competitiveness,and reducing the ones of foreign players with higher competitiveness.Are these policies really able to achieve a desire goal of improving the competitiveness of young domestic players? Will there be any other side-effects? This paper studies these problems.Based on the perspective of economics and combined with the match-level data of Chinese Football Association Super League in season 2016 and 2017,this paper studies the effects,and mechanisms,on the following three aspects: the individual performance of players,the technical efficiency of teams and the tactic decisions of coaches.The conclusions of this paper help to evaluate the "gain" and "loss" of the policies,reveal novel insights of the rational logic of decision makers,and have theoretical and practical meanings for the revision of the policies.The main innovation of this paper is not only the first study of these policies,but also the extension of economics across the field of sports.In addition,this paper uses micro-data of player individuals,teams and coaches in sports,which is also a useful attempt in data sources of empirical economic researches.The logic and the main findings of this paper are as follows:(1)To study the main-effect of the policies,this paper investigates whether the performance of U23 players and foreign players change with the implementation of the polies.Based on the tournament theory,this paper analysis the competitions for the startup positions between players within a team,and how the policies distort the effort level and the performance of players.The empirical study combines match-level data of players in season 2016 and 2017 with a difference-in-difference estimation method.The main findings are: on the one hand,the policies have led to a significant decline in the performance of U23 players.The number of successful passes,receives,and the time of ball control of individuals are reduced by 25.7%,35.1% and 16.1%,respectively.However,the policies improve performance for the most talented U23 players.On the other hand,the policies have no significant impact on the performance of foreign players.(2)The reduction of U23 players' performance has a macro-level meaning,that is,the performance of teams will also decline.In order to test this viewpoint,this paper combines match data of teams in season 2016 and 2017 with the method of stochastic frontier analysis to investigate the technical efficiency of teams.Furthermore,some teams have substituted the startup U23 players early in the first half of the match,which is related to the "New Policy for U23 Players" but has nothing to do with the "New Policy for Foreign Players".This paper uses such a fact to study the single effect of the former policy.The main findings are: the policies significantly reduced the technical efficiency of teams in the first half of the match with an average reduction of 14.1%.What lead to the reduction of the technical efficiency of teams are the decline of effort level of main U23 players and the decline of interactions between teammates caused by bench U23 players.The "New Policy for U23 Players" has a single effect on the decline in the technical efficiency of the team,but the existence of the one of the "New Policy for Foreign Players" has not been proven.(3)In order to evade the reduction effects on the individual performance of U23 players and the technical efficiency of teams,coaches can substitute the startup U23 players early in the first half of the match.However,this kind of policy evasion distorts tactical decisions of coaches themselves.Taken player substitutions as the research point of tactic decisions,this paper combines data of player substitutions in season 2017 with generalized ordered logit model,and studies how premature substitutions in the first half affect the type of substitution in the second half.Firstly,a factual conclusion can be drawn that,in the case of drawing and leading during matches,the premature substitutions increase the probabilities of defensive substitution,that is,tactics are more conservative.Meanwhile,there is no significant effect of the premature substitutions in the case of losing during matches.Then,mechanism studies found that the premature substitutions reduce the opportunities of substituting fatigue players in the second half and force coaches to use more conservative tactics to reduce players' expenses in physical strength.In conclusion,the policies have failed to achieve the desire goal of promoting the competitiveness of young domestic players.Worse still,they are counterproductive because of the decline of the performance of player individuals and teams,the more fatigue of players,and the more conservative tactics coaches use.Based on the conclusions,this paper puts forward some suggestions for further revision of the policies.