The name is absent

in the qualification matches. The sixteen participating countries were officially announced
on November 21, 2007, but several countries already de facto qualified before that date.
Using the outcomes of the qualification matches, we found the de facto qualification dates
for all Euro Cup participants; a group of four countries (Germany, Greece, Romania and
the Czech Republic) qualified about one month before the official date, on either the 13th
or 17th of October, while ten other nations qualified on the 17th or 21st of November.
The two remaining participants were Austria and Switzerland, the host nations, which
traditionally participate automatically. We exclude players with citizenship of these two
countries from the empirical analysis.

National coaches can select different players for every non-Cup national match if they
wish to do so, and as we will document there is indeed considerable variation over time in
national team compositions for non-Cup matches. The coaches have to nominate a fixed
team of 23 players for the Cup, however. The deadline for the coaches’ announcements of
their Euro 2008 teams was May 28, 2008, eleven days after the end of the German soccer
season. There were some differences between qualified countries regarding the date and
procedures according to which national coaches announced their nomination decisions,
but most coaches made their final statements either between the last but one and the
last, or after the last game day of the season.

A number of other international tournaments took place in the relevant time period:
the Copa America in July 2007, the Africa Cup of Nations in January 2008, and the
2008 Olympic games in August 2008. These Cups could potentially interfere with our
analysis by creating similar incentives as the Euro 2008 but for different groups of players.
However, in soccer these other international tournaments are much less important in terms
of media coverage and endorsement opportunities than Euro Cups, and some clubs do not
even allow their players to miss club activities in order to participate.¹⁷ Formally testing
for an incentive effect of the Copa America, using the same empirical strategy as described
below for the Euro 2008, we found no evidence of such an effect whatsoever. We therefore
feel that it is safe to ignore these other international Cups in the analysis.

¹⁷ For example, Bundesliga clubs Schalke 04 and Werder Bremen clashed with the Brazilian national
team over the participation of their players in the 2008 Olympic games. Similarly, Guy Demel of Ham-
burger SV forwent playing for his home country Ivory Coast in the Africa Cup of Nations in 2008 to
have more time available for his club.

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