Football players’ brand as a factor in performance rights valuation

Abstract

Brand building is one of the steps in a huge process called football globalization. This study aimed to identify football players who (owing to their popularity, salaries and market value) should be treated as brands. The hypothesis formulated in this study is that the brand of the football player appears when residuals in the econometric model are extremely large (for selected player). This means that his theoretical value is biased by an additional variable. This hypothesis should be confirmed by the relation of annual earnings of a player to his market value. The methodology of this study was based on the feasible generalized least square method (FGLS) with full statistical verification. The data obtained from www.transfermarkt.de for 150 most valuable football players were used in the analysis. The assumption of taking into account only attacking players was based on two basic reasons: 1) for this very homogeneous group, the same main factors influence the player’s market value (i.e., there is one set of independent variables), 2) for attacking players, the most spectacular transfers and the highest market values of their performance rights are observed.