When the crowd evaluates soccer players’ market values: Accuracy and evaluation attributes of an online community

•This research describes how an online community with interest in professional soccer evaluates players’ market values.•The community's market-value estimates are excellent predictors of actual transfer fees.•The community evaluations can largely be predicted using an econometric model that contains two blocks of determinants.•Blocks: measures that are directly related to players’ talent and variables that result from judgments by external sources.•Organizing variables into these two blocks provides a more differentiated look at the popularity of players.

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.This research describes the evaluation process of the community, investigates the accuracy of its estimated market values, and shows which attributes are most important for market-value evaluations. After demonstrating that the community's market-value estimates can predict actual transfer fees, we show that community evaluations can largely be explained by an econometric model that contains two blocks of determinants: variables that are directly related to players’ talent and variables that result from judgments by external sources (e.g., journalists). Reorganizing variables that were used in previous studies into two blocks (talent vs. external determinants) provides a more differentiated look at the popularity of players than recent literature on the “superstar phenomenon.”