هنگامی که جمعیت ارزش بازار بازیکنان فوتبال را ارزیابی می کند: دقت و ارزیابی ویژگی های جامعه آنلاین

Evaluating the value of athletes to determine whether they should be transferred from one club to another has become a major challenge for managers of sports teams. In the context of German soccer, aficionados have built a large online community that evaluates professional soccer players’ market values. The community has become the main source for reporting market values in the media and has a strong impact on sports economy: it is used in real market transactions and wage negotiations, indicating the power of crowd wisdom in the sports management context.

We define the market value of a professional athlete – such as a soccer player – as an estimate of the amount of money a club would be willing to pay in order to make this athlete sign a contract, independent of an actual transaction. However, evaluating an individual's value within any kind of team – such as a soccer team – is a challenging task. This research investigates how and how well an online community with special interest in professional soccer performs on such a complex task of human capital valuation.

Brunswik's lens model suggests that not all available attributes are equally used for final judgments on the target variable. Both regular community members and judges “look through” their individual lenses in order to evaluate market values. The next section analyzes attributes (Xi in Fig. 1) that are most frequently used in justifying market-value estimations made by the online community transfermarkt.de (Yf in Fig. 1). Beforehand, we provide some explanation for our categorization of these attributes.