Abstract: Prior research has provided evidence that attractiveness is associated with work-related advantages. It is less clear, however, whether attractiveness is an antecedent or a consequence of professional success. To answer this question, associational football in Germany is used as an exemplifying case. Portrait pictures of German football players were retrieved, one picture from a very early career stage and one from a very late one. Attractiveness of these portraits was assessed by the “truth of consensus” method. Panel regression models are applied to analyze changes in attractiveness and relate these changes to professional success. Findings show that success as a footballer cannot be predicted with attractiveness at early career stages. Instead, the increase of attractiveness over time is more pronounced among very successful players. It is thus concluded that successful individuals are not more attractive in the very beginning, but improve their appearance throughout their careers.
Keywords: attractiveness, beauty, appearance, professional success, football
Discussion and Conclusion
Large cross-sectional studies on football in Germany had shown that attractiveness and success are correlated (Rosar et al., 2010, 2013, 2017). In the interpretation of this association, it was claimed that coaches may give attractive footballers an advantage in fielding decisions which may help attractive players to become successful. In particular, the interpretation that coaches favor more attractive players was put forward by Rosar and colleagues (2017). However, bearing in mind that football is one of the few professional domains where attractiveness has particularly no relevance as a productivity factor, this interpretation comes as a surprise. Our results lend more support to the notion that players who are fielded more often (and are thus more often in the public spotlight) invest more into their beauty. Although this needs to be tested in future research more explicitly (including measures for grooming), the findings presented here suggest that the beauty premium in sport is probably more accurately interpreted as a by-product of beauty work and not as a form of discrimination against less attractive players.
If this line of reasoning is correct, it is still unclear what motivates this beauty work: On one hand, professional athletes are offered huge financial rewards for attractiveness and popularity, because these qualities are valued by media and the sport industry. For an athlete, beauty work can thus be a form of strategic investment to reach a broader public beyond the narrow scope of regular football fans and, in doing so, increase his endorser qualities. David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo may be considered textbook examples of this strategy (Coad, 2005). In forms of sponsorship and marketing deals, beauty work may thus pay-off for athletes and lead to higher revenues. However, Hamermesh et al. (2002) have also contested the idea that additional earnings due to investments in physical appearance recover costs (e.g., for clothing and cosmetics). However, this study was not conducted in the realm of professional sport and may thus not hold true in this particular context. On the other hand, beauty work must not necessarily represent an investment strategy, but may simply be a form of “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen, 1899/2007). Conspicuous consumption refers to the acquisition of luxury goods, including expensive clothing, to publicly demonstrate wealth and a high social status. Hence, in this line of interpretation, the “returns” of beauty work do not tend to a monetary but to a symbolic level, aiming at distinction and prestige. Moreover, it was also claimed that showy spending increases sex appeal among men (Sundie et al., 2011). Hence, beauty work among high-class football players, who stand in the limelight of a huge TV audience each weekend, may simply represent a form of impression management to showcase oneself in a positive way and generate symbolic capital.
This finding comes with strong implications for future research on the role of physical attractiveness in professional sport: Future research has to go beyond correlational analysis and needs to employ longitudinal research designs to be able to discriminate between different mechanisms at stake. Simple correlational analysis does not suffice for making conclusive inferences on the impact of attractiveness on football players’ careers. Moreover, as the current study leaves unclear why successful football players improve their physical appearance, future research should address beauty work and its financial and symbolic returns.
One limitation of this study is that it measured beauty solely based on facial attractiveness. According to Hakim (2010), beauty, sexual attractiveness, physical fitness, liveliness, charm, and style are distinctive features that can make a person attractive for others. Although some of these characteristics are hard to measure as they are not assessable with pictures (e.g., charm) or change quickly (e.g., style), it should be kept in mind that this study (as with many previous studies) reduces beauty to facial attractiveness while ignoring other (body) characteristics. Moreover, as an alternative to the “truth of consensus”-rating method, scholars have suggested a software-based approach, analyzing facial geometry, for instance, horizontal symmetry, ratio of nose to ear length or ratio of face width to face height (Hoegele et al., 2015). This is a promising approach so that future studies would do well to integrate rater-based as well as software-based methods for assessing facial attractiveness. Finally, this study solely focused on male athletes so that it remains uncertain whether these findings would also hold for female athletes. Previous studies on attractiveness and occupational success found stronger effects for women compared with men (Jæger, 2011). Similar findings were reported for female professional tennis players, whose popularity is much more driven by their attractiveness compared with male players (Konjer et al., 2019). However, in view of the fact that women’s football is less professionalized and commercialized as a sport in Germany (e.g., with regard to media coverage, salary levels, or endorsement deals), the incentives to invest into beauty and appearance may not be as high as in men’s football. Hence, replications of this study in women’s football, in other fields of professional sport, and in different domains of the entertainment industry would be helpful to assess whether the findings presented here are generalizable or an expression of peculiarities of European associational men’s football.
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