Pagare per vincere: le determinanti del successo sportivo in Serie A

This article empirically investigates the determinants of sport success in the Italian football top league (Serie A). The analysis focuses on the availability of talent, approximated by each team’s total wage expenditure for players, in order to assess the contribution of this factor to the overall sport performance. We analysed data for 41 teams that took part into Serie A between 2001 and 2016, developing team fixed-effect panel econometric models. Our results show that wage expenditure is an excellent predictor of sport success, independently of the variable adopted to measure sport performance and controlling for a set of explanatory variables chosen according to the relevant literature on this topic. Moreover, this work supports the existence of changes in the intensity of the wage-performance relationship when comparing the whole period with the post-Calciopoli period.