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

Highlights

•	Player market values in professional football are thought to reflect prior performance and human capital.
•	However, controlling for prior performance and human capital, job moves shape market values.
•	Upward moves shift player market values up, downward moves push market values down.
•	Each additional upward job move has a cumulative positive effect on market values.
•	The negative effect of downward moves reduces when players are more important for their new team.

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.

Keywords:

• Boundaryless careers
• Job mobility
• Career signals
• Market value
• Professional football

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology grant number MOST 105-2410-H-110-085.

Notes

1 In a 2010 article titled “Career by numbers: Footballer” The Guardian claimed that an average player career lasts 8 years. In 2014, the Dutch consultancy firm Berenschot published a research report commissioned by the Dutch player’s labor union VVCS and the association of Dutch professional football teams FBO stating that an average player career lasts around 10.5 years.

2 No undirected job moves took place in the months prior to TM published market values for the players examined here. This variable is thus not included in the models.