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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

> the mean salaries of the teams

This is new to me. Is the mean salary of a national team predictive? And are you using the mean salary the nation pays or their club salaries?

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It's an established metric that uses club salaries. Is it predictive? The top 4 on that metric are Brazil, Germany, France, Spain.

Did I miss this year’s World Cup? How can something be predictive for an event that hasn’t happened?

Weather forecasts predict weather that hasn't happened yet. What is the point in predicting something that has happened?

I can say it’s going to rain 10 days from now based on whether it’s cloudy today. I wouldn’t say it’s a good prediction until it rains 10 days from now.

In other words: how effective has this salary prediction worked out in the past?

There's a significant margin of error, but at a high level, the higher someone's salary, the better player you can expect them to be. There are some $10M players who aren't as good as $2M players, but a $30M player is likely considered far superior to a $2M player.

Yeah, I’m familiar with the concept of salaries.

My questions were: 1) is this an established metric that’s commonly used to predict football (soccer) results and 2) what salary are we talking about, the amount the nation plays to its team’s players (e.g. Brazil pays more than England) or the amount a nation’s players earn on their club teams (e.g. Neymar earns more at PSG than Rooney does for Everton)?

(1) At a high level, yes, they look at it. There is a very strong relation between winning and team pay in soccer. There is a reason why Real Madrid has won 4 out of the last 5 champions leagues. Similarly, PSG and Munich are by some distance the best paid teams in their leagues and win their respective leagues pretty much every year. This market today is quite efficient, sure there are always going to be some undervalued middling players here and there, but the very best players do not go unnoticed and so they are paid well and bought by the richest teams.

(2) the discussion is naturally about how much they earn for their clubs presently. National teams pay no salary and many top players do not, and in some cases, have never played in their birth country's own league.

> National teams pay no salary

This is not even close to true.

https://www.totalsportek.com/money/footballers-salaries-with...

https://www.quora.com/How-much-are-football-players-paid-for...

Club salaries.

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