Statistical Modeling of Football Players’ Transfer Fees Worldwide

Abstract

Professional football clubs invest vast amounts of money in the recruitment of players. This article presents the latest advances in statistical modeling of the factors that market actors take into consideration to determine the transfer prices of professional football players. It extends to a global scale the econometric approach previously developed by the authors to evaluate the transfer prices of players under contract with clubs from the five major European leagues. The statistical technique used to build the model is multiple linear regression (MLR), with fees paid by clubs as an independent variable. The sample comprises over 8000 transactions of players transferred for money from clubs worldwide during the period stretching from July 2014 to March 2024. This paper shows that a statistical model can explain up to 85% of the differences in the transfer fees paid for players. Despite the specific cases and other possible distortions mentioned in the discussion, the use of a statistical model to determine player transfer prices is thus highly relevant on a global scale.