We tend to think of workers as valuable because of what they do – the goods they produce, the services they provide. But what happens when workers are valued instead for what they are worth on a balance sheet, or for how much value they can add to an organisation’s assets?
In recent years, ‘assetisation’ – the process by which people, things and capabilities are turned into income-generating assets – has gained traction in the social sciences as a way of describing a new logic of capital accumulation. Rather than making money by selling goods or services, this logic focuses on transforming resources into assets that generate continuous financial returns: through rent, speculation or capitalised future earnings. Research on platform economies, land and natural resources has shown how this financial logic restructures ownership and governance to create new forms of rent extraction. Studies of professionals, content creators and gig workers further illustrate how individuals increasingly engage in self-assetisation, strategically managing their skills, visibility and networks as income-generating assets.
Two major consequences stand out. First, assetisation restructures employment relations, reconfigures workplace discipline and reshapes professional identities. Second, assetisation pushes financial risk downwards onto workers and intermediaries, making labour bear the costs that asset-based logics generate but that organisations do not formally absorb. To explore this, I draw on fieldwork conducted with health professionals in elite football, using this case to develop three propositions for scholars and those concerned with the futures of work in financialised workplaces.
In professional football, the assetisation of players’ bodies does not occur spontaneously. It is enacted through the daily work of health professionals – physiotherapists, sports physicians and performance staff – whose role has been progressively reshaped by the financial logic governing the industry. My findings show that these practitioners have become key intermediaries in the process through which athletes’ bodies are transformed into financially valorised assets.
My first finding concerns the function of health and performance data. Metrics such as Global Positioning System outputs, biomarkers and injury-recovery timelines serve not only as clinical instruments but as valuation devices: they translate bodily conditions into numbers that stand in for a player’s financial worth. This helps overcome the problem of putting a price on something as complex and variable as a human body. Yet, as my interviewees consistently noted, these metrics remain subject to interpretation. The apparent objectivity of measurement conceals a practical judgement that health professionals are increasingly expected to make in financial terms, not merely medical ones – a pressure that can sit uneasily with their clinical ethics.
My second finding concerns where health professionals are positioned within the broader process of asset valuation. Far from being confined to treatment and prevention, these practitioners are called upon at two critical commercial moments: during recruitment, when clubs assess a prospective player’s physical condition as part of their financial valuation; and during transfer negotiations, when health status directly affects market price. Fitness assessments and medical certifications become tools of financial appraisal as much as medical evaluation.
A third dynamic extends beyond the club itself. Several practitioners described working through private centres that agents use to improve the physical – and therefore financial – profile of players they represent. Health professionals thus become part of a wider investment logic, helping to increase an athlete’s value as an asset managed across multiple actors. This outsourcing of physical valuation further draws the body into financial circuits, blurring the line between medical care and asset management.
From this case, I draw three propositions for understanding what assetisation does to labour.
First, assetisation introduces a distinct mode of workplace discipline – one that operates not only on the workers being assetised, but on those tasked with managing the process itself. Health professionals illustrate this most sharply: no longer simply clinicians, they are brokers expected to translate bodily signals into financially readable assessments, calibrate recovery timelines against contractual obligations, and certify readiness in ways that serve financial valuations as much as medical judgement. The discipline they experience arrives not as direct pressure but as a role quietly redefined – to care for the body is increasingly to manage an asset. Assetisation is insidious precisely because it does not announce itself, dressing organisational demands in the language of professionalisation and data-driven practice. Ethical friction, when it surfaces, tends to be experienced as a personal tension rather than a structural problem.
Second, assetisation is a mechanism for shifting risk as much as extracting value. Health professionals who accelerate a player’s return from injury against their medical judgement, or certify fitness under commercial pressure, absorb risks that the asset-based logic creates but that the organisation does not formally carry. Labour – including that of intermediaries like health professionals – becomes the primary casualty of asset-driven decision making, a point that existing assetisation studies have largely overlooked.
Third, and most fundamentally, assetisation dissolves the boundary between the person and the productive resource. When an athlete’s injury is framed primarily as a depreciation of an asset, the distinction between who the worker is and what the organisation extracts value from becomes difficult to sustain. If bodies are simultaneously personal attributes and organisational assets, the boundaries of the employment relationship are themselves in question – stretching organisational control into dimensions of the self, health and physical integrity that were previously considered outside the scope of work.
The football pitch may seem like an unlikely place to develop a theory of modern work. But the dynamics uncovered here – bodies valued as balance-sheet entries, professionals enrolled as brokers of the organisation assets’ financial worth, risk redistributed onto those least able to refuse it – are not peculiar to sport. They are visible wherever asset-based logics have taken hold, for example, in universities where researchers are managed as reputational assets whose visibility and citation counts shape the organisation’s market position. What the football case allows us to see with unusual clarity is the human infrastructure that assetisation requires –workers who do not simply have their labour extracted, but who are recruited into extracting it from others, and who absorb the ethical costs of doing so. For the labour movement, this matters. Traditional frameworks of exploitation focus on the wage relation: who captures the surplus produced by labour. Assetisation asks a different question: who bears the risk, and who carries the contradictions, when work is reorganised around the logic of asset management.
Pau López-Gaitán is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol Business School. His research examines how financialisation reshapes organisations, labour relations and forms of resistance from within. He uses the football industry as a laboratory to trace how financial logics alter the conditions of work and collective life.
Image credit: maks_d via Unsplash
