Talent and/or popularity: What does it take to be a superstar?

Abstract

We show that both talent and popularity significantly contribute to stars' market values in German soccer. The talent-versus-popularity controversy on the sources of stardom goes back to and All attempts to resolve the controversy empirically face the difficulty of accurately identifying talent. In professional sports, rank-order tournaments help in ascertaining talent. Analyzing a team setting, we use 20 different performance indicators to estimate a player's talent according to his ability to increase the team's winning probability. © 2010 Western Economic Association International.