For a Global Political Economy of Income, Life and Elite Soccer

The soccer world cup has reached its quarterfinals. We are now in a position to see how success in the world's most popular sport relates to two conventional indicators of world-wide, country-to-country differences in life conditions: "national" income and life expectancy at birth. Below I examine how the 32 teams that had qualified for the World Cup, the 16 that passed into the direct elimination phase, and the eight quarterfinalists fare in terms of their material wealth (measured in GDP/cap, the Maddison estimates I have used many times) and life expectancy at birth (the latter data come from the World Development Indicators dataset collected by the world's governments and compiled / published online by the World Bank.) I do so for the latest available timepoints (see the tables). Most interesting to me is the question of the ways in which the countries that have qualified their soccer teams to the World Cup differ from the rest of the world (if at all).

According to data presented in the Maddison Project, in 2018, the world average per capita GDP was just over 19 thousand USD, and the world median was just over 12 thousand. The group of 32 countries that made it to Qatar exceeds that average to a very large extent: Their average per capita GDP was almost twice that (just below 36 thousand USD), and their median per capita income was more than three times higher. This suggests an extreme degree of income censoring effect: To get to the World Cup, a much higher "national" income was required than what the average societies of the world have. How much higher? Well, the second column in the table above suggests that the world's poorest society had a meager income of USD 623, while the poorest country that was able to send a team to Qatar had to have approximately 4.2 times more (USD 2,617 to be precise). Once we get to the quarterfinals, the minimum income "quota" is 13.6 TIMES higher than the lowest per capita GDP in the world. To put differently, the World Cup excludes the world's poorest in several steps: First, by disallowing them from participating in the 32 of the Cup; second, by dropping the poorest societies as the game proceeds toward the finals.

As we move to the top 16, the mean per capita GDP of the teams still in the running declined somewhat (from almost USD 36 thousand to USD 32,428). This is the result of the elimination of some of the "national" teams on the richer end of the income scale, most notably the host country, Qatar, with its over USD 153 thousand GDP/cap. The average income of the teams still in competition has continued to come down--to USD 26,767--coming closer to the midpoint of the global distribution of income. As for the median of the quarterfinalists, it is still much--more than twice--higher than the median of the world as a whole.

The distributions observed thus far are consistent with the idea that the most successful countries in the game of soccer are in the upper echelons of what Immanuel Wallerstein and his disciples have called the "semiperiphery" and the lower tier of the core of the world economy. The magnitude of this narrowing of the field of competition is indicated by the decline in the [standard deviation / mean] scores: It is 1.08 for the world as a whole, only to be reduced gradually as we move from the 32 through the 16 to the 8 teams (t is .78, .50, and .47 in the three groups, respectively). But, things are not so simple as to claim that the rich will have better access to the World Cup than others. Clearly, there have been some societies that have qualified for the World Cup 32 "using" their relative income advantages--only to have been eliminated in one of the two next rounds by teams from (slightly) poorer countries whose teams happened to play better on the field. 

Now--to what extent does this regularity translate into quality of life for the populations of those countries? I find Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB) to be a useful and relatively simple tool to measure the latter.    

In 2020, the world mean LEB stood at 72.7 years, with the median at 74.3 years. Clearly, the starting lineup of the 32 countries that had sent their soccer teams to the Qatar World Cup shows a positively skewed distribution: the average LEB of the 32 "World Cup countries" is ~6.5 years, and their median is 6.1 years higher than the world average. Even the country with the worst social conditions among those that qualified for the World Cup (the one with the lowest LEB among the 32 participants) had an astonishing 14.5 years higher LEB than the world average. To put this in perspective, the figure of 14.5 years is almost twice as high as the standard deviation of the world distribution.

Perhaps the most astonishing regularity in the second table is that, in contrast to per capita income, LEB figures do not decline as we proceed from the 32 through the 16 to the 8 teams: The mean LEB of the 32 qualifying countries is 6.5 years above the world mean, followed by 6.74 years and 6.44. The minimum "qualifying requirement" in fact increases from the already breathtaking 14.5 years for the group of 32 to 22.4 years for the quarterfinalists. The single most visible difference that sets apart the teams that have qualified for the quarterfinals is that they provide social conditions that allow their citizenry to live at least 22.4 years longer than the bottom of the world distribution, while the average life expectancy is essentially unchanged between the 32, the 16 and the quarterfinalists. 

The data presented in the two tables above suggest, hence, that the soccer World Cup is a game that privileges countries in the upper-semiperipheral-to-core parts of the global income scale and, furthermore, the system works such that even the societies with the relatively lowest LEB figures among those in the quarterfinals have provide very considerably better life conditions than most of the world's societies. . . so much so that the minimum LEB of the countries whose teams are in the group of 8 is ~3.3 years higher than the world mean (!), putting them at 1.8 years above the world median. 

These data allow us to show a visual representation of the match lineup of the quarterfinals.

(In both graphs, going toward the right indicates a higher per capita income; moving up we find the countries with longer LEB-s. I have also inserted a regression line to represent the relationship between income and LEB for the world's capitalist societies.) 

The graph clearly shows how the quarterfinalists are all in the top-right hand side of the global distribution, i.e., they involve the relatively richer societies of the world that have above-the-world-regression-line life expectancy at birth figures.  

The second graph is an enlargement of the previous graph, focusing on the eight countries whose teams are in the quarterfinals. Clearly, the England-France match is between two teams whose countries occupy almost indistinguishable positions in the global distribution. On the other extreme, the Morocco-Portugal and Argentina-Netherlands games will pit against each other pairs of teams that represent countries that are quite distant from each other in terms of income but less so for LEB: all eight quarterfinalists have Life Expectancy well above the global regression line. 

And--on other thing. As the graph just above this paragraph suggests (see the green oval shape to the top and right), the richest countries, and those whose population has the longest life span--presumably because they provide the best living conditions--in the club of elite soccer includes teams from not one, not two. . . not even three. . . but a whopping 4 (FOUR) erstwhile colonizing states: "England," France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Some others--Belgium, Germany, Spain, the US and "Wales," for instance, had been there among the 32 but eliminated later. Of the remaining four quarterfinalists, three--Argentina, Brazil and Morocco--are of course erstwhile colonies (of Spain and Portugal, as it happens); Croatia meanwhile has a history of longue-durée subjection to external rule by another, contiguous type of empire. Colonialism, albeit supposedly by and large abolished two generations ago, still continues to show up, even in such, apparently trivial, things as world soccer.  As a result, four of the quarterfinalists are EU-member states. (It would be five, had the UK not withdrawn from the EU a few years ago.)

Thankfully--or, perhaps more modestly, I hope--all this says nothing about the quality of the game each of the teams will be able to play on the field.