An Ahp/anp Multicriteria Methodology to Estimate the Value and the Price of Professional Football Players*

This paper presents a new methodology based on AHP and ANP (Saaty, 1980, 1996) to estimate the value and transfer fees of professional football players. The paper extends the AHP multicriteria methodology proposed by Moreno-Jiménez et al. (2010) for estimating the value of these sportsmen. The new approach multiplicatively combines the (intrinsic) value of the player (estimated by means of AHP through a hierarchy that includes technical, sportive and socio-cultural criteria) with a corrector factor, which reflects economic and business aspects. This factor, which modifies the value of the player by increasing or decreasing it as a percentage, is obtained in two different ways. The first is by means of AHP and considers the four (independent) actors associated with any economic transaction the market, the player, the seller and the buyer; the second supposes dependencies among these actors and is calculated by means of ANP. The proposed methodology has been applied to estimate the value and transfer fee of the Spanish footballer David Villa.