Mourão, P.

Local development and competitive soccer teams location. The Portuguese case

This work is focused on testing the following hypothesis: “The competitiveness of a Portuguese professional soccer team is influenced by the economic development level of the surrounding region.” Using a rational choice model and working with binary time-series cross-sectional data, this work focuses on a Portuguese professional soccer team from 1970 to 1999. This is the first work on the teams and economy of Portugal that tests this hypothesis. The results corroborate the main importance of three factors that increase the probability that a municipality will house the head office of a team that plays in the first league: 1) the per capita income, 2) level of infrastructures, and 3) demographic dimension.

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