GDP per Capita versus FIFA Rank

Another typical excuse offered to justify the ability of some countries to win consistently is their economic output. It makes sense to some extent. The richer countries have more money to invest in sports and high tech training facilities. The citizens of the rich countries have a higher standard of living and tend to expose their children to sports at an early age. Rich countries have established leagues and actively participate in international sports associations and sporting events.

But is that really the case? It is well established that money buy superb talent and thus success at the club level. (E.g. exhibit A: Chelsea FC; Exhibit B: Real Madrid C.F.; Exhibit C: F.C. Internazionale; etc.) But does money create football talent that can compete at  a national level? Again it is possible, but is it likely?

In other words: Is it really the economy, stupid?

It easy to compare FIFA Rank with GDP per capita found in the CIA factbook. GDP is the Gross Domestic Product which is the value of all goods and services made within a country. The GDP per capita is GDP divided by population and a better metric that shows how well off the citizens of the country are. Also helps dealing with England. The plot of the data versus the 12/2009 FIFA Rank is shown below.

It was more fun generating that plot! The MATLAB code to generate the plot is shown below:

plot( points, GDPcapita*1e-3, 'o', 'markersize', 5, ...
  'markerfaceColor', [0 0.8 0], 'markerEdgeColor', [0 0.2 0.7])

P = polyfit(points, GDPcapita, 1);

vv = polyval(P,points);

residualSTD = std( vv - GDPcapita);

R = corrcoef(points, GDPcapita);

hold on
plot(points, vv *1e-3, 'k-', 'linewidth', 1.5)
hold off
grid on

axis([200 1800 1 ceil(max( GDPcapita*1e-3 )) ])
set(gca, 'XTick', [200:200:1800], ...
   'YTick', [1:4:ceil(max( GDPcapita*1e-3 )) ceil(max( GDPcapita*1e-3 ))], ...
   'fontsize', 9, 'fontname', 'Consolas')
xlabel('FIFA Rank Points')
ylabel('GDP per capita in thousands USD')
title('Data (dots) and 1st order fit (line)')

text(points + 30, GDPcapita*1e-3, strrep(country, '_', ' '), ...
   'fontname', 'consolas', 'fontsize', 10, 'color', 'b')

MATLAB also offers a built-in GUI (plottools) that can do a lot of great things with mouse-clicks. My preference is to use command line interfaces. (The good thing about GUIs is that What You See Is What You Get. The bad thing about GUIs is that What You See Is The Only Thing You Get!) Actually, that particular GUI is good in that it does not seem to leave anything out and some times I use it because it is faster than writing code for an unusual aspect of an one off plot.

Back to the plot: There is a general trend that says rich countries field good football teams. But the correlation is very weak. Also, the data seems shifted above and below the trendline which is probably the result of a binomial distribution (rich versus poor.) And Brazil and Argentina that are perennial winners do not have very wealthy citizens. Therefore:

It is not likely that national economic output and thus national wealth is a significant factor in the success of a country’s national team in world football!

Basic statistics for the 32 countries participating in the 2010WC:

Sample size = 32

Max: $47,500 (USA)

Min: $1,500 (Ghana)

(GDP per capita for Greece: $32,100)

Mean: $21,391

Median: $22,100

Intercept: 8,362.5

Slope: 14.1

Residual std. deviation: $13,978

Correlation = 0.2772