Upward and downward job mobility and player market values in contemporary European professional football

Abstract

One question facing professional football (soccer) players in today's highly mobile football labor market is how to move between teams and develop boundaryless careers that positively signal their qualities, skills, and value to the market. The author departs from previous researchers, who have conceptualized market values as a function of performance and human capital factors at one point in time. Instead, the author argues that market observers face imperfect information when estimating the value of players, which they overcome by using job mobility as a signal for the qualities, skills, and playing potential of footballers. Analyzing a unique longitudinal dataset of 1670 professional player careers with fixed effects panel regressions, results indicate that upward mobility is a positive signal shifting observers' estimations of player market values up and downward mobility is a negative signal pushing market values down. Each extra move up leads to an additional increase in market values and the negative impact of downward mobility decreases when players take up more important roles in their new team. The impact of mobility on player market values is thus contingent on broader career patterns and the context in which job mobility takes place.