Long live Fenerbahçe: The production boosting effects of football

The connection between Turkish industrial production performance and the success of a popular Turkish football team, namely Fenerbahçe, is the central theme of this article. The success of Fenerbahçe is interpreted as a proxy for the workers' mood or morale. Performing a transfer function analysis on our monthly data set, we reveal positive feedback from Fenerbahçe's success, which proxies workers' mood/morale, to economic performance such that the monthly industrial growth rate increases by 0.26% with the number of games won by Fenerbahçe in European cups regardless of where the game is played. Evidence of the effects of games against domestic rivals on industrial performance is not statistically significant.