Predicting Market Value of Egyptian Premier League Players

Abstract

Prediction of players' market value for the most popular sport on the planet through a data driven approach has no more became an option. In the last decade, football transformed from a sport to an industry with football players as the most valuable asset. Despite this fact, there hasn't been a systematic framework to address simple questions such: What really determines the value of a footballer? How much should a club pay when purchasing a certain player in a certain position on pitch in a certain season? Based on which criteria such that any subjectivity is eliminated? With the right answers to these questions, in the right time, a club as a revenue maker is assured to gain an unparalleled edge to its rivals. The Egyptian Premier League (EPL) is one of the top 5 leagues across Africa with total net worth of 105, 900 million Euros and still lacks a scientific approach to assign a proper estimate for a player's market value in a given season. In an attempt to bridge this gap, this research presents an end-to-end fully data driven scientific framework covering all given functions and hence positions of a footballer on pitch, be it a defender, midfielder, attacker or a goalkeeper. Players are first segmented as either: elite, high-potential or mainstream, according to their history of performance and then a prediction model is applied to predict the expected future market value accordingly. The results were tested and validated on real data and the model evaluation showed very promising results.