title: The Anatomy of the Global Football Player Transfer Network: Club Functionalities versus Network Properties.
abstract: Professional association football is a game of talent. The success of a professional club hinges largely on its ability of assembling the best team. Building on a dataset of player transfer records among more than 400 clubs in 24 world-wide top class leagues from 2011 to 2015, this study aims to relate a club's success to its activities in the player transfer market from a network perspective. We confirm that modern professional football is indeed a money game, in which larger investment spent on the acquisition of talented players generally yields better team performance. However, further investigation shows that professional football clubs can actually play different strategies in surviving or even excelling this game, and the success of strategies is strongly associated to their network properties in the football player transfer network.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.|Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration, Southeast University, Ministry of Education, Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Xiao Fan
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8342-4623
authors.initials: XF
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Yu-Liang
authors.initials: YL
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Xin-Hang
authors.initials: XH
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Qi-Xuan
authors.initials: QX
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Tong-Xing
authors.initials: TX
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009938:Organizations / Q000191:economics*; D012916:Soccer / Q000191:economics*; D012944:Social Support; D013177:Sports / Q000191:economics*