LA STIMA DEL VALORE ECONOMICO DEI DIRITTI PLURIENNALI ALLE PRESTAZIONI SPORTIVE DEI CALCIATORI PROFESSIONISTI: UN APPROCCIO INNOVATIVO

In recent years, in Europe, the football industry has experienced a period of rapid growth, reaching to take the economic dimensions of absolute importance. In particular, in the season 2005/2006, the European football market has reached a turnover of 12.6 billion euros, an increase over the previous year of about 1 billion euros. All major European leagues (England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France), representing approximately 53% of the total market, showed a measurable increase in total 430 million euros, probably due to the positive impact of the World Championship held in Germany in 2006. Although the English Premier League continues to generate the most significant turnover of around 2 billion euros, the French League showed the highest relative and absolute growth, an increase of 31%, corresponding to approximately 214 million euros. Therefore, we can assume that in the clubs main asset is the ability to dispose of sporting performance of professional players, acquiring, mainly, market related fees. In order to understand the relevance of the phenomenon of buying the rights to sporting performances of professional players, this paper, in particular, focuses on the analysis of the total purchases and sales made in the last three seasons in Italy. In recent years, the economic science and the best business management practices have focused on the technical evaluation of rights to sports performance of professional footballers, highlighting the critical conceptual and the unsatisfactory degree of commonality and reliability of the results achieved thus far. The present work aims to investigate issues related to estimation of the rights of professional football players sports performance, performing, at the outset, a critical review of the main contributions in this area and, later, proposing possible solutions based on the experience already established by economic science on the subject of the evaluation of human capital.