A story of myopic gamblers and uncertainty: A fascinating account of the global transfer market in football

Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen
Liverpool John Moores University, UK

A book on the global transfer market in football must be said to represent a welcome addition to the literature. Not only is the transfer market under-researched from a sociological point of view, but phrases like ‘silly season’, ‘rumour mill’ and ‘done deals’ are now widely established in football’s everyday vernacular. Over the last decades, we may witness the rise of the ‘transfer guru’ and what can only be described as the ‘spectacularization’ of the transfer market’s ‘deadline day’. One of the world’s leading sports broadcasters, Sky Sports, even operates its own dedicated ‘Transfer Centre’ where readers are constantly fed transfer news and rumours.

It would certainly be easy to dismiss this obsession and view it as a distraction from far more ‘important’ things (cf. Eco, 1986). Yet, all these trends and turns are simultaneously direct consequences of a global arena – or a marketplace – where football players are transferred from one club to another.

Whilst the notion of ‘global football’ has been commonly explored theoretically and empirically through cases of foreign ownerships, powerful broadcasters, football governance, or football supporters’ resistance towards these trends (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2012; Numerato, 2015; Lee Ludvigsen and Millward, 2019), Thijs A. Velema’s Football Clubs and the Global Transfer Market provides a timely and fascinating account of another important facet of global football – namely, the global transfer market.

Specifically, Velema is concerned with developing a theory of the transfer market which uses football clubs as its key actor. As such, he sets out to understand better clubs’ decision-making, activities and operations.

As Velema highlights, many of the above-mentioned issues (e.g., overseas investors and owners, the loss of a fan identification, a perceived lack of locality) must, in one way or another, be seen as related to the transfer market. Specifically, Velema is concerned with developing a theory of the transfer market which uses football clubs as its key actor. As such, he sets out to understand better clubs’ decision-making, activities and operations. In doing so, he draws upon a large-scale dataset with data from Transfermarkt, which covers transfer market activities in the top eight European leagues (between July 2006 and June 2022), in order to develop a sociological theory of why clubs are best understood as, in Velema’s words, myopic gamblers on the transfer market’s demand side. Hence, Velema departs from earlier hypotheses devised from the position of the supply side of the market, including efficient market and globalization scholars. As he writes:

Taking uncertainty, rather than efficiency or globalization as the defining characteristics of contemporary football emphasizes that the transfer market is neither the perfect competitive market of economic theory nor is it the fully integrated global market of globalization scholars. Rather, the global transfer market is a patchwork of smaller, geographically confined transfer markets loosely strung together by the occasional myopic gambler taking a bet by recruiting past its immediate geographic vicinity (p. 16).

This argument is then developed across the book’s eight chapters (plus appendix). The first three chapters can be read as the book’s foundation. Chapter One maps the contours of Velema’s theory, but also situates the sociological significance of the global transfer market. Chapter Two unpacks further the economic efficient-market and sociological globalization hypotheses, by appraising the insights from these literatures. Here, the former holds that clubs are rational talent appraisers using the publicly available information about a player to make well-informed decisions on which players to sign (or not). The latter, meanwhile, emphasizes clubs’ role as ‘great globalizers’ who drive forward an international labour force. These distinct propositions, Velema argues, are mostly focused on the supply side of the transfer market. Yet, as he argues, ‘assumptions made by both perspectives on how teams operate on the demand side of this labour market do not withstand empirical scrutiny’ (p. 41). Chapter Three, then, provides a strong contextualization of player-club relations and the regulatory history of the transfer market, which of course has not been isolated from power struggles between players, clubs, leagues and international organizations, the strong forces of professionalization, globalization and commercialization and, notably, the implications of the famous 1995 Bosman ruling which ‘swung the pendulum of power from clubs to players’ (p. 59) and made transfer market activities increasingly complex.

The following chapters develop the author’s theory of clubs as myopic gamblers and explain why clubs operate in this way as a coping mechanism for the risks and uncertainties of trying to manage a (successful) football club. This is done by empirically zooming in on the issues of player retention (Chapter Four), clubs’ use of homegrown players and youth academies (Chapter Five), and, finally, player recruitment through permanent transfers (Chapter Six) and temporary loan deals (Chapter Seven).

Taken together, the chapters, first, successfully dispel some of the ‘myths’ or conventional wisdoms vis-à-vis the transfer market and how football clubs operate. For example, it is found that unlike the oft-held assumption that clubs are ‘conscientious talent developers’ using their academies to secure a good financial return; many clubs, in fact, are lucky to break even, and often investments into youth academies are higher than the transfer earnings on club-trained players (Chapter Five). Meanwhile, rather than engaging in a full-on global pursuit for the next big talent, Chapter Six shows that ‘[g]eographically speaking, clubs recruit the bulk of their transfers domestically from clubs in the same country’ (p. 121).

Second, these chapters underpin Velema’s main thesis, which is summarized in Chapter Eight and captures that, rather than rational talent appraisers or great globalizers, clubs are myopic gamblers who, often recruit locally (rather than globally) in the hope of finding a winning formula. In relation to why this is the case, Velema points towards uncertainties that are ‘baked into the very fabric of the game’ (p. 148). Some of these uncertainties include uncertainty about on-pitch performances and financial risks leading clubs to rely on short-term contracts; uncertainty regarding a player’s capabilities; and uncertainty about which strategies that will, ultimately, lead to on-pitch success.

Overall, Football Clubs and The Global Transfer Market is an important and ambitious monograph. It is well-written and very clear in its argumentation. Undoubtedly the text will be of high interest to scholars and students of the sociology of sport, sports economics and management, and organization studies. Beyond this, it is also clear that the book could speak to the sociology of risk and uncertainty – and it could have been interesting to see the conclusions and theoretical implications of Chapter Eight, in particular, be discussed in relation to some of this work (e.g., Beck, 1992; Giddens, 2006). Especially concerning how conditions of uncertainty and risk both directly and indirectly influence how organizations or institutions (in this case: clubs as myopic gamblers) operate against, approach and live with uncertainty as an omnipresent aspect that arrives with the high stakes of elite football. Moreover, it could also have been interesting to read a little more about how the top eight countries in European football were determined. The ‘big five’ – England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France – seems an obvious choice, but how was Portugal, the Netherlands and Russia decided upon, and how might such ranking be in flux and reflect non-linear commercialization processes in European football? Rather than limitations, these are merely points I thought about upon reading Velema’s book, which – in a world of ‘silly seasons’ and ‘transfer gurus’ – helps our understanding of what lies beneath all this.

Copyright © Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen 2025

References

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society. London: Sage.

Eco, U. (1986) Travels in Hyper Reality. London: Pan Books

Giddens, A. (2006) Fate, risk and security. In: Cosgrave, J. (eds) The Sociology of Risk and Gambling Reader. Routledge: New York, 29-60.

Giulianotti, R. and Robertson, R. (2012) Mapping the global football field: a sociological model of transnational forces within the world game. The British Journal of Sociology, 63(2), 216-240.

Lee Ludvigsen, J.A. and Millward, P.  (2019) Global elites and sports ownership: Emerging economies, ‘foreign’ owners and new strategies. In: Maguire, J. (eds) The Business and Culture of Sports. MacMillan Reference: USA, 167-180.

Numerato, D. (2015) Who says “no to modern football?” Italian supporters, reflexivity, and neo-liberalism. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 39(2): 120-138.