When is the performance-pay relationship stronger? Evidence from the Big-5 football leagues

Across organizational and managerial settings, a commonly held belief is that the pay of resource providers and their performance are closely linked. Yet, the boundary conditions of this claim have not been thoroughly explored; that is, scholars do not know much about those factors that might contribute to the decoupling between performance and pay. We explore the above topic by leveraging a dataset of 686 professional soccer players in the major European leagues. Our results show a positive association between players' performance and their salary, but they also show that this relationship is negatively moderated by: 1) players' popularity 2) players' status 3) players' visible performance. Therefore, better performing players tend to be better paid, but for players that are popular, have high status, or whose visible indicators of performance are above average, performance does not predict pay as closely. We conclude by discussing implications of our findings.