Jensen’s problem of governance revisited by the relative age effect on spanish football

Abstract

This study analyses Jensen's problem of governance by examining the Relative Age Effect (thereinafter RAE) on Spanish Football. We analysed the players of thetop eight Spanish football academies (n=736). Four of the academies belong to clubs and four to Sport Stock Corporations (SSCs), all of them are playing in the top tierof Spanish football. We used the Poisson Regression analysis to identify the presence of the relative age effect. The existence of RAE is found to be significant (p<.001)in both clubs and SSCs. According to Jensen's governance theory, SSCs should be more efficient, and therefore the starting hypothesis would be that they would notbe affected by the RAE bias whereas clubs should. The results of the study refute Jensen's problem of governance and are a new contribution to the stakeholder’stheory. Policymakers should consider governance reforms, such as hybrid multi-stakeholder models, to counteract RAE. It is also evident that the RAE is a bias thatnotably affects football academies and other sports with a lot of participants.