Every four years several billion people spend an inordinate amount of time watching television. No, not Eurovision. World Cup fever strikes deep, a potent mix of nationalism, hooliganism, and referee-hatred. Life and death (and a great deal of property damage) are decided by each game. The worldwide excitement is high. The group stage is complete, and tomorrow marks the beginning of the knockout rounds where the fate of each team rides on a single game, and possibly a single foot. What a perfect moment for the first installation of Erratum Terrium's Spellbindingly Entertaining Statistics!! SES!!!
Money is, now more than ever, an integral part of the sports world. Even in the World Cup where player salaries don't figure, rich countries still have a significant advantage. They can recruit and train players from a young age, support them throughout their career, and provide a much higher levels of resources for their national team. And, unlike the poorer countries, they have mountains of extra support from corporate sponsors and therefore don't have to make budgetary sacrifices to provide those same resources.
Yet the World Cup retains fundamental equalizers that the overall international system lacks. The rules are the same for all teams; a goal struck by Cameroon or Paraguay is equal to one struck by France or the United States. But what is the relationship between a country's wealth and its 2010 World Cup success?
At first glance it appears that wealth is a fairly good predictor of success. Only 1 of the 7 poorest* teams (Ghana, the tournament's poorest side) made it past the group stage, while 5 of the 8 wealthiest* teams made it.
*Here we are measuring "wealth" by GDP per capita in PPP$ as measured by the IMF in 2009, with the sole exception being North Korea whose numbers are based on a 2009 CIA estimate. Let it be said loud and clear that Erratum Terrium's use in this situation of GDP per capita is a pure measurement of total country wealth. We do not, repeat, do not believe in GDP per capita as an accurate measure of the economic situation in any given country.
So the wealthiest teams tend to do better than the poorest teams. Fairly predictable, but not the whole story. Let's take a look at efficiency; that is, how well a given country used its wealth to achieve World Cup success. Here we will look at points scored in the group stage as a percentage of GDP per capita. Excluding the two teams who failed the score a point (North Korea and Cameroon, both very poor countries) there were twelve teams whose points scored made up less than 0.02% of their GDP per capita. Except for Algeria ($6,869) all of those teams have GDP per capita above $26,700 and only two of them (the United States and England in a fairly easy Group D) made it past the group stage. On the opposite side, there were 6 teams whose points made up at least 0.05% of their GDP per capita (with the most efficient being Ghana at 0.26%). 5 of those 6 teams qualified for the knockout round, with the only return-ticket team being Ivory Coast, who to their benefit managed 4 points in the Group of Death with powerhouses Portugal and Brazil despite the second-lowest GDP per capita among all 32 teams.
And for the wealthy countries, their successes were costly. Let's imagine that each country's citizens (the fictionally equal citizens implied by the GDP per capita calculations) had to pay for their points and goals with equal contributions based on GDP. The French would have to pony up $33,679 for each point, and the Swiss $43,007 for each goal. Meanwhile the Ghanaians only need to flip over $388 for each of their points, and the people of Ivory Coast only $419 for each goal scored.
Of course in all this analysis we are ignoring the 150+ countries that failed to qualify for the World Cup, most of which are poor. Although it is worth noting that none of the world's 5 richest countries qualified.
So basically we can say that while wealth is a fairly good predictor of World Cup success, it by no means assures any victories -- which France, Australia, Denmark, and Switzerland found out the hard way. And while poverty hinders World Cup success, it cannot contain quality play -- which Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Paraguay have proved this year.
We will have an opportunity to test the effects of the wealth disparity tomorrow when Ghana, the tournament's poorest team, takes on the United States, the tournament's wealthiest team with a GDP per capita nearly 30 times that of Ghana, on the first day of knockout play (Mighty Ducks, anyone?). For the sake of barefoot kids kicking plastic bottles down dirty streets around the world, let's hope the Black Stars comes out victorious.
ADDENDUM (4/7/10)
Victory was short-lived. In the first knockout round Ghana (#151 GDP per capita in the world) defeated the U.S. (#6) and Paraguay (#117) made sushi rolls out of Japan (#23). England (#19) and South Korea (#30) were sent packing. The quarter-finals, on the other hand, brought a harsh dose of reality to the economic underdogs. All four games saw the wealthier country take home victory. The lone, not-so-rich, non-Eurozone holdout is Uruguay (#62), who needed penalties to send the Black Stars home. Trivia Twist: Uruguay won the first ever World Cup in 1930.
A few more statistical snacks...the average GDP per capita ranking for the 32 teams which qualified for the World Cup was 59 (out of 182), and the median ranking was 39. Much of that differential is due to Paraguay and Ghana, the only two teams from the bottom economic half to qualify. Below see the changes in the average GDP per capita rankings of qualifying teams:
World Cup = 59
Knockout round = 49
Quarterfinals = 64
Semifinals = 29
¡Uruguay all the guay!
