How economics define who wins the World Cup

Today Spain plays its final to win the world soccer championship. Beyond technical criteria, for years there have been several studies that have attempted to establish some correlation between sport and the economy. In his famous 2004 research on the Olympic Games, Who wins the Olympic Games economists Andrew B. Bernard and Meghan R. Busse showed that a nation’s total GDP—which combines the size of its population with its wealth per capita—is the best predictor of sporting success. The thesis is that money buys infrastructure, technology and coaches, while the population provides the critical mass necessary for natural sporting talent to emerge. What do the data of this World Cup say?

Let’s see. Since 2022, Spain has registered accumulated growth close to 10%, the highest among the large economies of the eurozone, and it is also one of the few States where the population has increased (between 2022 and 2025 it added around 1.5 million inhabitants). On the opposite front, Germany, eliminated in the round of 32, and Italy, which fell in the group stage, have achieved poor sporting results in a context where their demographic pyramid is aging (24-25% of the Italian population is over 65 years old, the highest proportion in the EU) and their wealth is stagnant or in recession (the accumulated growth of the German GDP since 2022 is negative).

Likewise, in this edition, Morocco, Egypt, Paraguay, Colombia, Senegal, Congo and Cape Verde put great football powers in trouble. “Emerging and developing economies now represent almost half of global GDP, when at the beginning of the century they were around 25%, and have contributed to most of the growth of the world economy in the last twenty years,” says Jeremy Cunningham, of Capital Group, in his note. Lessons from the biggest World Cup in history .

However, with football several distorting factors come into play in the equation. How does it fit, for example, that a country like Argentina, winner of the last World Cup and finalist in 2026, has been one of the leaders on the field for years despite having a battered economy?

An explanation was already suggested in 2002 by economists Robert Hoffmann, Lee Che Ging and Bala Ramasamy in their research. The socio-economic determinants of international soccer performance for him Journal of Sports Economics where they identified that football performance draws an inverted “U” curve with respect to GDP per capita. Their argument is that, above an intermediate-high wealth threshold, sporting success stagnates. The estimated turning point was then $21,836 per capita income (at today’s exchange rate it would be almost $40,000).

Once this level of income is exceeded, sports performance tends to decrease. In affluent societies, digital and academic leisure alternatives proliferate that compete for young people’s time and reduce the practice of outdoor sports. On the other hand, in environments with greater economic inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient), as is the case of Brazil, with five World Cups, professional football remains the main social elevator. The authors speak of a “Latin factor”: aspirations in several Latin American countries are channeled through the ball. Didn’t Diego Armando Maradona emerge from the misery of Villa Fiorito like this? In these less advanced societies, thanks to the lower barriers to entry (it requires little equipment compared to other sports), football monopolizes attention and, furthermore, children’s athletic talent is not dispersed into other disciplines.

Another element that breaks the parallel between economic power and football power is the influence of the “star player.” In his research this year, Population, GDP per capita, and qualification for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Economist Gregory Papanikos argues that discrepancies between model predictions and actual results are due to the chance and generational emergence of exceptional individual talents (such as Luka Modrić in Croatia or Cristiano Ronaldo in Portugal). “These elite players act as an exogenous shock of human capital capable of raising the performance of small, low-income teams above their demographic and economic baseline, allowing them to challenge traditional structural determinants.”

The football boom in emerging countries also has another economic explanation: globalization. Thanks to the transfer market, a developing country does not need to have a league or million-dollar local infrastructure to compete. Countries like Senegal or Morocco export their best talents to European leagues. There they train with the best technology and tactics in the world, and then “repatriate” that accumulated knowledge for free when they play with their national team.

As for China, it is true that the size of its GDP at the moment is not reflected on the grass. As in the US, football has little cultural roots there. But it is interesting to highlight how in the Olympic Games. Beijing does meet the economic parameters. In the study cited at the beginning, the authors wondered how it was possible that China, until the end of the nineties, only won 6% of the medals. The answer is that subsequent public planning and massive investment in infrastructure helped boost sports results in an almost Keynesian way. In the end, economic models help explain why some teams start with an advantage. But they are of little use when the fate of the party is decided in a field where even God has put his hand.