MIMG Alumnus Thomas Kalapis Succeeded in the ESOP Contest

The International Programmes team would like to express its sincerest congratulations to MIMG alumnus Thomas Kalapis who succeeded in the ESOP (excellent students’ research work) contest, in which the best students’ written works are awarded every academic year.

The topic of Thomas’s diploma was “Does Money Really Buy Titles? An Empirical Analysis of the “Big Five” European Football Leagues” written under the guidance of associate professor Marek Hudík. Down below you can read the management summary of the thesis.

Management summary

“Why couldn’t you beat a richer club? I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.”

– Johan Cruyff

 Acknowledging the evolution of association football, widely known as “soccer” in North America, this rather simple game has turned into a worldwide business. Induced by the globalization, commercialization, and overall economization of the world’s most popular sport, European football clubs have no longer been only competing on the pitch. At the same time, research has utilized publicly available football data to assess, among others, the relationship between an individual football player’s monetary value and his performance.

Postulating rationality, football teams with the most valuable individual players should also be most successful. Building upon prior research, this thesis examines the predictability of sportive success based on a team’s initial (relative) market value across the major European football leagues, the so-called “Big Five”. Then, by applying a novel two-dimensional approach to examine this relationship at the individual player and the team level, potentially existing inefficiencies in the football players’ labor market are detected and further exploited to form strategies that can be relevant to any football club.

This study finds evidence for the predictive power of market values. In line with this, it is determined whether a team overperformed or underperformed by conducting a benchmarking analysis. Furthermore, this research outlines how market value and performance based on several classifications of football players, such as a player’s position or signing type, can substantially differ. It generally stresses the importance of player development and long-term recruitment strategies to secure sportive and financial success.