On September 6th, 2017, Roberto Gásquez Mendoza defended his doctoral thesis titled "Football and economy relations at the international level.” supervised by Dr. Vicente Royuela Mora and Dr. Patricia García-Durán Huet.

The doctoral committee was composed of Dr. Jaume Garcia Villar (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Dr. Plácido Rodríguez Guerrero (University of Oiedo) and Dr. Pedro García del Barrio (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya) who decided to grade the PhD thesis with an “Excellent” mark with the mention of Cum Laude.

This doctoral thesis studies, from different perspectives, soccer, an example of the phenomenon of globalization. The first application shows that football can be considered an indicator of development at an international level. The second proposes a model to identify and measure the factors that determine the performance of countries through their national football teams. Finally, it examines whether the proportion of foreign players is related to the success of national and global football clubs.