Roast and pasture: two economists explain why soccer stars leave Argentina

Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi, Pelé, Ronaldhino, Neymar and Luis Suárez are some of the examples of footballers who have become legends in the sport from South America.

Why are Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay a crepe maker? The economist Martín Rossi, Doctor of Economics and Vice-Chancellor of the University of San Andrés, has tried to answer this question through the paper Making Maradona with which he developed Christian Ruzzier, PhD in Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics.

The work analyzes the causality between meat consumption, football skills and levels of poverty in which these players emerge.

“We started looking at the most important players in history and saw that Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay are disproportionately over-represented in the global distribution of talent,” Rossi explains.

“Most of the best Brazilian players are from the area gaucha, from San Pablo and its surroundings, and in Argentina and Uruguay they come from the Pampean area. The peculiarity of this area is that the poor eat meat. And we started working on this hypothesis,” he explains.

“Meat provides protein and this enables the development of cognitive abilities. And football is not just running, it requires quick thinking, connections. Messi is super smart,” Rossi says in one episode of the podcast at the cornerdeveloped by the economist Diego Bossi.

The study gathered information on the 59 players who were nominated for the Ballon d’Or between 2016 and 2019 and found that 28 of these players grew up in low- or lower-middle-income families in countries with high meat consumption.

In Argentina, meat is cheaper than in other countries. The kilo is worth on average 6 US dollars to the official dollar and 3 US dollars to the MEP, while in Brazil it reaches 8 US dollars, in Uruguay 10 US dollars, in Paris and New York it is around 20 US dollars and in Shanghai the $13, according to a report from the AZ Group.

Beef consumption has decreased over the past decade in the country. It reached 90 kilos per capita in the 70s and today it is 47 kilos. Behind this decline is the impoverishment of the population and also the change in consumption habits. The consumption of pork, in fact, has tripled in the last fifteen years: it has gone from 5 kilos per capita to the current 16 kilos.

The consumption of chicken is also growing, which today with 46 kilos per capita per year practically equals that of beef. So, the latest data points to it Argentines consume 118 kilos a year, including cow, chicken, pig, fish and lamb.

The key to cognitive development

From the connection between meat consumption and cognitive development, one could conclude that there should be more cracks in rich countries, where meat consumption is higher.

But meat is not the only factor in the development of football talent. “The opportunity cost of time is much higher for the rich than for the poor,” Rossi says. And he explains that upper-class people, when deciding what to do with their lives and with their time, tend to choose to go to university, while “for a poor person the opportunity cost of time is much lower, you can spend the day kick a ball. They may spend hours grazing, while the upper classes spend that time on other activities“.

“Argentina, southern Brazil and Uruguay have this mixture that is probably unique in the world: the poor eat meat, which is not common in other parts of the world. It is very clear that the poor eat much less meat than the rich, but compared to the poor than other places, here they eat more».

“Combining roast with potrero creates talent, which doesn’t mean that if you eat a lot of roast you’ll have talent”contributes Diego Bossio.

Rossi anticipates that they are studying whether meat consumption can explain social mobility. “If you are born poor and malnourished, you cannot develop your cognitive abilities and this limits you. Cognitive skills are necessary to develop socially. Due to the consumption of meat among the poor, this necessary condition is met, although this does not mean that they will progress, but have a better chance of upward social mobility.”

AQ