Sabotage in Tournaments: Making the Beautiful Game a Bit Less Beautiful

We exploit an incentive change in professional soccer leagues aimed at encouraging more attacking and goal scoring to obtain evidence on the effect ofstronger incentives on productive and destructive effort. Using as control thebehavior of the same teams in a competition that experienced no changes inincentives, we provide differences-in-differences estimates of the effect of theincentive change on the behavior of teams. We fi…nd that, although teams in-creased offensive effort, they also increased destructive effort ("sabotage") substantially, resulting in no net change in scoring. When ahead, teams becamemore conservative, increasing their defenders, scoring less goals, and allowingfewer attempts to score by their opponents. We also …find that teams that engagemore in sabotage activities depress the attendance at their rival's home stadiums, and that indeed attendance suffered as a result of the incentive change.Thus, teams responded to stronger incentives, but in an undesirable way.[...]