The performance or successes of elite athletes have been assumed to affect ordinary people by encouraging them to play sport. This plausible effect is referred to as the trickle-down or role-modelling effect. Previous studies of this subject have examined the correlation between indicators associated with the hypothesis or compared indicators before and after an event. Causal issues, therefore, remain unexplored, regardless of whether or not they support the view that elite athletes influence the general public. The main contribution of this paper is to identify the causal effect of elite athletes’ success on teenagers’ sports participation based on a case study of Japan. The hypothesis tested in this study was that Japanese women’s victory in the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup increased Japanese junior high school girls’ participation in extracurricular sports activity, especially soccer. We found no quantitative evidence supporting the role-modelling effect. This implies that the increase in their participation following the 2011 World Cup would have been observed regardless of whether the Japanese national team won. We discuss the implications of this finding, and suggest further research directions, paying special attention to the Japanese situations.
