Influence of popularity on the transfer fees of football players

Autor: Malagón Selma, María del Pilar, Debón Aucejo, Ana María, Doménech i de Soria, Josep
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: 4th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2022).
DOI: 10.4995/carma2022.2022.15067
Popis: [EN] Search popularity, as reported by Google Trends, has previously been demonstrated to be useful when studying many time series. However, its use in cross-section studies is not straightforward because search popularity is not provided in absolute terms but as a normalized index that impedes comparisons. This paper proposes a novel methodology for calculating popularity indicators obtained from Google Trends to improve the prediction of football players' transfer fees. The database is formed by 1428 players who competed in LaLiga, Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A, and Ligue 1 on the 2018-2019 season. Random forest algorithm and multiple linear regression are used to study the popularity indicators' importance and significativity, respectively. Results showed that the proposed popularity indicators provide significant information to predict players’ transfer fees, as models including such popularity indicators had lower prediction error than those without them. This study's developed method could be used not only for analysts specialized in sports data analysis but for researchers of other fields.
This work was partially supported by grants PID2019-107765RB-I00 and funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.
Databáze: OpenAIRE