Players Market Value at Risk: A Model and Some Evidence for the German Bundesliga

Abstract

The market value of players forms a major asset of any modern professional football club. As with any asset, the expected benefits from having the right to use a player within a team, are also offset by risks that must be managed adequately by the club. To this end we, describe a simple risk-management tool that managers of football clubs can use to model and monitor a player’s market value at risk. Our model consists of three elements. First, we use a quantile-regression approach to study how performance parameters of football players affect their market values. To this end, we study data for 327 players of the German Bundesliga for the season 2015/2016. Our estimation results show that the time played significantly affects the lower part of the conditional distribution of players market value, while the number of goals and passes (assists) affect the upper (middle) part of the conditional distribution. Second, we fit a flexible continuous probability density function to the estimated quantiles of the conditional distribution of players market value. Third, we analyze how performance parameters affect the market value at risk and the expected shortfall of market value. We use an out-of-sample analysis to validate our empirical model.