Which Method to Use for the Valuation of Football Players’ Image Rights?

In this article, a series of decisions by the Spanish National Court concerning the allocation of image rights’ returns of certain football – FC Barcelona – players are critically examined. The exploitation of such image rights was conferred to entities owned by the very players; hence transfer pricing regulations were triggered. The cases touch upon several relevant transfer pricing topics, such as the choice of the most appropriate transfer pricing method to value the remuneration the players should obtain, the nature of the functions performed by the entities that exploited such image rights, or the consideration of the image rights as hard-to-value intangibles.