Joining the club: European Union accession and the quality of national football teams
2026-06-30
This article investigates how European Union (EU) accession affects the quality of national football teams. Using Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia as late-accession cases, we exploit the staggered timing of their entry to estimate the causal impact of joining the European Union through a difference-in-differences framework applied to monthly ELO ratings (1997–2022). Results show that EU accession is associated with a sudden and persistent decline in national team performance, amounting to about 50 ELO points at entry and nearly 80 after 3 years. This deterioration coincides with a marked increase in the share of players employed abroad, suggesting that integration, while expanding individual opportunities, weakens collective quality. EU enlargement thus provides a useful institutional setting in which to examine how major regulatory changes can generate transitional costs in domains where coordination and identity matter, highlighting the dual nature of integration: efficiency gains at the individual level versus short-term losses in collective performance.