Lineups for Euro 2016: a comparison of European football leagues

    Attention, football on Habré! This post prompted me to download data on the distribution of players of Euro 2016 participating teams in the national leagues in which they play. At a significant tournament in the national teams, the strongest players at the moment are being called up. In this sample, we can compare European football championships among themselves. Which leagues are the most representative at Euro 2016 and at the expense of whose national teams? Under kat graphics (traffic) and some reasoning. Whistle, the game has begun!






    In what championships do the participants of the football Euro 2016 play?


    From this Wikipedia page we load the data on the national teams. From these data it is known for which clubs the players in the national teams play. Consider the distribution of these players in the national championships in which they take part. We confine ourselves to those 24 national championships, whose national teams are represented in the final part of Euro 2016. We are building a chord diagram.



    This and all subsequent pictures are clickable, links lead to html diagrams shown in the pictures.


    It is easy to see the most representative national leagues at Euro 2016. If you exclude self-citation - those players of national teams who play in the championship of the same country that they represent, then the overall contribution of the big leagues will become even more significant.



    For the championships of England, Germany and Italy in the first places in terms of number of players are the teams of neighboring states (regions). Seven players of the Icelandic national team chose the Swedish league.


    Add information on the transfer value of national championship players


    Parsim from the site transfermarkt.com data on the total estimated transfer value (as of June 21, 2016) of all players in each of the national leagues of the top division. In different countries, the number of league teams is different. Therefore, we will focus on the cost of the “average” club of the national championship - the ratio of the total league cost to the number of league clubs.


    We overlay pictures with the assessment of the capital of football championships (right axis) and the number of players playing for national teams of other countries (left axis). The columns below the zero mark (red) show the number of players of the national team who play in the championships of other countries participating in Euro 2016.



    The situation on the left side of the chart is quite predictable. But the peaks of value on the right side are interesting - these are the football leagues of Portugal and Belgium. The high transfer value of the Portuguese league is probably due to the greater share of expensive Latin American football players in this championship compared to leagues of other countries. But what is happening in Belgium? This is the ninth most expensive championship among the countries in question. And he delegated to the Euro, in addition to 4 players of his own team, only one representative of the Icelandic team.


    There are seven donor leagues at the tournament - at Euro 2016 their championships are represented by more players than the national team from the championships of other countries. These are the first seven leagues on the previous chart, from England to Russia. For example, you might think that England's football championship is ahead mainly due to the teams of Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland. The teams of these three countries are almost entirely composed of players of the English championship. Consider the distribution of national team players between donor leagues.



    This schedule once again confirms the dominance of the English league in terms of the number of its representatives at Euro 2016. Next comes the three of the championships of Germany, Italy and Spain, in that order, taking into account previous indicators. It is worth noting Turkey, which in these schedules is second only to France in the league transfer value.


    Transfer value of national championship players playing at Euro 2016


    Now we will evaluate the contribution of each of the national leagues to the squads for Euro 2016 not by the number of players, but by their total transfer value. We still estimate the transfer value of players (as of June 21, 2016) from the site transfermarkt.com.
    The amounts on the html chart are given in millions of euros.



    From the previous schedule, we exclude those players who play in the same national championship, the national team of which they represent. We get the following result



    In the last chart for the championship of England, the first roles are played by the players of the Belgian, French and Spanish national teams, instead of the players of the football associations of the regions adjacent to England.
    The league of Spain comes out on a clean second place. So, the transfer price of the only player in the Wales team playing in the Spanish championship is slightly less than the cost of 20 Wales football players from the English championships.
    The German League is in third place, confidently ahead of the Italian League.
    Note that the leagues of France and Turkey again do not significantly differ.
    Due to the players of their own national teams, the leagues of Russia and Portugal are at the level of the leagues of France and Turkey. But without the support of the latter, Portugal’s league share is shrinking. The Russian football league stably holds seventh place.


    Time is up, the match is over!


    PS Chord diagrams and column-area graphs are made in R using packages chorddiagthat googleVisprovide an interface between R and JS D3 library, Google Visualization API.
    R script with data extraction and construction of the first three chord diagrams can be found here .


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