The Anatomy of the Global Football Player Transfer Network: Club Functionalities versus Network Properties

Professional association football is a game of talent. The success of a professional club hinges largely on its ability of assembling the best team. Building on a dataset of player transfer records among more than 400 clubs in 24 world-wide top class leagues from 2011 to 2015, this study aims to rel...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2016-06, Vol.11 (6), p.e0156504-e0156504
Main Authors: Liu, Xiao Fan, Liu, Yu-Liang, Lu, Xin-Hang, Wang, Qi-Xuan, Wang, Tong-Xing
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ability
Biology and Life Sciences
Clubs
College football
Computer and Information Sciences
Computer science
Engineering
Football players
Game theory
Games
Globalization
Humans
Male
Organizations - economics
Physical Sciences
Services
Soccer
Soccer - economics
Social networks
Social Sciences
Social Support
Sociology
Sports - economics
Sports clubs
Sports teams
Statistical mechanics
Team sports
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Professional association football is a game of talent. The success of a professional club hinges largely on its ability of assembling the best team. Building on a dataset of player transfer records among more than 400 clubs in 24 world-wide top class leagues from 2011 to 2015, this study aims to relate a club's success to its activities in the player transfer market from a network perspective. We confirm that modern professional football is indeed a money game, in which larger investment spent on the acquisition of talented players generally yields better team performance. However, further investigation shows that professional football clubs can actually play different strategies in surviving or even excelling this game, and the success of strategies is strongly associated to their network properties in the football player transfer network.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0156504