Ricerc@Sapienza

This article investigates the influence of performance, popularity, and bargaining
power on ‘super-earnings’ using a unique panel dataset of Italian football players
built on various sources of data. Using OLS, Panel, and Unconditional Quantile regression
techniques, we find that detailed measures of these factors are all significantly
associated with higher wages. Popularity dominates all the other factors at
the right tail of earnings distribution, and the agent’s power contributes mostly to
allocate players in richer teams. These new findings challenge the interpretations of
super-earnings based only on very talented workers who ‘win and take all’.