Work group diversity in professional football: an individual-level approach to the effects of diversity in organizations

Abstract

Objective: Although there is a huge literature examining how diversity affects group performance, an important limitation is the lack of evidence at the employee level. This article tries to fill this gap. We focus on professional football given the high ethnic diversity of football squads, the nonexistence of language barriers to hire players, and the granularity of data. Methods: Relying on data from 1528 professional footballers joining a new club in the 2021–2022 season in five European countries, we run ordinary least squares cross-sectional regressions with standard errors clustered by club. Results: We find that ethnic backgrounds do not make a difference in the performance of professional football players in their new clubs. However, newcomer players with a different ethnic background than natives in their new clubs do better the younger they are and when subgroup imbalance in the squad is high. Conclusion: Our results support the approach integrating the social categorization and the information/decision-making perspectives. From the players’ recruitment or renovation perspective, our results can help managers and coaches to make correct recruitment decisions.