The Effect Of Income Disparity To Performance Of Soccer Teams In League 1

The soccer industry has been significantly reshaped by the processes of capitalization and globalization in recent decades.Top soccer clubs have explored new methods to enlarge their profit.such as selling broadcast rights,selling soccer-related merchandises and receiving sponsorship from well-known enterprises.The diversity of income resources have boosted the development of the Top Five Leagues in Europe,bringing much more revenues to professional soccer players.However,it is not an economical or wise way to encourage soccer players only by raising their incomes.How to construct an effective incentive mechanism to motivate professional soccer players has aroused heated discussion among not only top soccer clubs but also academia.This paper focuses on the relations between income disparity and the performance of professional soccer players.Using data of French League 1 from 2016 to 2018,we constructed a conceptual framework from the perspective of incentive system.From our empirical results,we find that the range(both represented in form of max-min and max/min)can effectively motivate the overall performance of the team.However,the overall income disparity of a team(expressed in form of coefficient of variation)has an reversed U-shaped effect on the team’s overall performance.We also investigate the functional channel of income disparity and find that enlarging the level of inequality of income to some extent would encourage the individual performance and team cooperation of soccer players.Our findings also indicate that the interaction effect of income disparity and professional performance is significant positive on 1%level among French League 1 players.We suggest international soccer club to focus more on the top 20 percent players and to narrow the income gap of middle-income players in order to have better overall performance.Our methodologies and conclusions may as well provide new ideas in the field of income disparity studies.