Addendum to Football Post

I had recently hypothesized on the dismal performance of stars. After writing that post, I sent an email to Turkish football economist Tugrul Aksar. He wrote back with a detailed answer: 

There is apparently a chapter in his book Football Economics (in Turkish) on externalities, but he had not used my approach there. 

In any case, he noted that, with the relative uncertainty embedded in football and the fact that there is no guarantee performance, many theoretical underpinnings would not materialize in practice. He is right on target on this. I would add that those conditions that he mentions make a proper empirical test quite difficult.

Tugrul Aksar also suggested that I look into the work of UK academic Stefan Syzmanski, who has written on this topic. BTW, he is the author  of Soccernomics, one of my most-reads for the summer, if I ever find the time. Once I have the time to read of his work, there will be an addendum to this addendum:)

BTW, a close friend for whom I have a lot of respect for (but not his football team, since we are talking about that) also made an interesting suggestion: He noted that he sees the British Premier League and (somewhat to a lesser extent) the Spanish La Liga as extremely demanding leagues, and because of that, he would expect players from those leagues to underperform in the World Cup.
 

This is another interesting idea, and one which would be very easy to test once I can settle on the appropriate empirical methodology: All I would need to do would be to put dummies to players for these two leagues...