The Determinants of International Football Success: A Panel Data Analysis of the Elo Rating

Abstract

This paper investigates the determinants of football success at international level. We introduce three innovations as a) we apply the model developed by Bernard and Busse (2004) to football. b) We consider a wide panel of countries over a 33 years period and c) we supplement FIFA's classification with the Elo rating system. Our results, which are robust to several sensitivity analyses, show that economics, demographics, weather, geography and football institutions are good indicators of football success at international level. Besides, the Elo rating is a better alternative indicator that the FIFA ranking, and it may be used in the academic works that wish analyse a long period of time.