In our globalized society, different cultures repeatedly interact. As a consequence, issues of assimilation and integration of immigrants become salient. Sport is an interesting sector to study the different behavioral effects of cultural diversity and assimilation of immigrants for several reasons. First, migration is a particularly salient phenomenon. The share of migrants in the main sports leagues in Europe and North America is very large compared to other economic sectors, in particular for the top leagues. Second, the sport sector is one of the few sectors for which objective individual measures are available.
One behavioral aspect in which the impact of a different cultural background of football players might be reflected is infringements on the football field. These infringements can be measured by the number and severity of sanctions (yellow or red cards) awarded during football games. Such football penalties are granted for many reasons such as committing violent fouls, wasting time, ignoring referee instructions or humiliating the opponent.
In a recent paper (De Luca et al., 2011), we use micro-data from the English Premier League, the top European league that has experienced the highest immigration flow of football players for many years, to empirically investigate (a) whether there is a difference in football penalties between immigrant football players and local football players, (b) whether immigrant players adjust their behavior on the field the longer they stay in the league to which they migrated, and (c) whether there are differences in behavior between different types of migrants, in particular southern European and northern European immigrant players.
In contrast to existing cross-sectional evidence, we use panel data which allows to measure changing player behavior in a more accurate way. We use detailed player data covering 14 English Premier League seasons from the 1996/97 season to the 2009/10 season. Following the literature, we measure infringements on the football field by setting up a count variable of “disciplinary points” where we assign one point for a yellow card and two points for a red card.
Descriptive evidence of the effect of a player’s cultural background on disciplinary points is illustrated in Figure 1. Over the entire period (from the 1996/97 season until the 2009/10 season), the average number of disciplinary points per season for the British players (2.5) is lower than that for the southern European players (2.8) but higher than that for the northern European players (1.9). Interestingly, when one separates the entire period into 2 sub-periods (from the 1996/1997 until the 2002/2003 season and from the 2003/2004 until the 2009/2010 season), the average number of disciplinary points for British and northern European players is the same. However, the number for the southern European players in the first period (3.1) is much higher than in the second period (2.4). In more recent years, there is no difference with British players.
Controlling for a player’s number of games played as a starter and as a substitute, experience, position on the field, age, fraction of home games played, ranking of the player’s team and year dummies, we empirically show that southern European football players in the English Premier League collect on average more yellow and red cards compared to their British colleagues. In contrast, northern European football players in the English Premier League collect on average less yellow and red cards compared to their British colleagues. More specifically, the rate of disciplinary points per season is 1.3 times higher for southern European players than for the benchmark category of British players. Similarly, the rate of disciplinary points per season is 0.8 times lower for northern European players than for the benchmark category of British players ceteris paribus.
We also find that the number of football penalties incurred by southern European players is initially higher but converges towards the local average the longer their experience in the English Premier League. More specifically, our estimates imply that one additional year of English Premier League experience reduces the disciplinary points for southern European players by around 5%, as compared to the reference category of British players. Although limited to a specific context, this change in behavior patterns of immigrants suggests cultural or behavioral assimilation: after paying the consequences of playing according to their home set of norms during their early seasons in the English Premier League, migrant football players adapt their behavior to the local standards.
These results are robust to a variety of changes in the empirical specification such as using alternative measures for disciplinary points (assigning zero, two or three points for a red card), using alternative measures for experience (using the cumulated number of games played rather than the number of seasons played), taking into account the differences in Premier League experience between immigrant and local players (trimming the sample by considering only the first nine seasons played by each player), extending the sample of migrant players (including players from other southern European member states of the European Union) and using alternative estimation methods (using the fixed effects Poisson and Zero-Inflated Poisson methods rather than the preferred random effects Poisson method).