The Evolution of Football Player Valuation: A Bibliometric Analysis (2000-2025)

Clubs and investors need to have full knowledge of the economic conditions within the football game, because the movement of the market value provides a strong force on the transfer strategy as well as the wage structure and financial regulations of fair play. A bibliometric analysis has been conducted to evaluate the market valuation of professional football players and investigate the extent to which the idea of performance metrics and the institutional factors have influenced the valuation practices of clubs in the transfer market. A sample of 357 publications, which are listed in the Scopus database between the year 2000 and 2025, was collected and utilized to determine the current trends and research gaps. VOSviewer was used to analyze the corpus and produced networks of co-authorship, co-citation, co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling. The study reveals that recent research in the field of sports economics and finance is majorly written in Europe, published in journals dedicated to football business and economics, and uses more sophisticated tools, including machine learning, player-tracking data, and network analysis to determine player value in the transfer market. Network visualisations indicate three major areas like what drives transfer fees and wage rates received by clubs, how financial controls in leagues and revenue systems affect player values, and new valuation systems that combine on-field performance metrics with financial information. Since 2018, the trends have highlighted the high volatility of player values in an instant, the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on salaries and market values, and the talent concentration required in order to create competitive balance. The research offers an extensive summary of the discipline, descriptions of under-researched field topics, including women football and lower leagues, and outlines the practical solutions on managing the club and future research directions.