Intellectual capital and market valuation of footballers

Abstract

Football clubs are traditional institutions with the particularity of having the main characters of their successes as intangible assets, that is, their players. The aim of this work is to analyse the determinants of the market values using intellectual and structural capital indicators as explanatory variables. Descriptive statistics and panel data model estimates were used in the analyses to control the footballers’ fixed effects, the club's fixed effects and the effects of player-year and club-year interactions. Results confirmed that footballers’ market value is determined by a set of variables that can be explained by components of human capital (one’s skills), structural capital (infrastructure that supports human capital). Understanding the players’ pricing can help both clubs and players to improve their management and increase the possibility of financial success.