The teams for Euro 2016: a comparison of European football leagues

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

In which championships do the participants of Euro 2016 play?

From this page of Wikipedia we load data on the composition of national teams. From these data it is known which clubs are the players of national teams. Consider the distribution of these players in the national championships in which they participate. We confine ourselves only to those 24 championships of countries whose 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 for Euro 2016. If we exclude self-citations - those players of the national teams who play in the championship of the same country that they represent, then the total contribution of the big leagues will become even more significant.

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

Add information about the transfer value of players in national championships

Parsim from the site transfermarkt.com data on the total estimated transfer fee (as of 06/21/2016) of all players in each of the national leagues of the top division. In different countries, the number of teams in the league is different. Therefore, we will focus on the cost of the "average" club of the national championship - the ratio of the total cost of the league to the number of league clubs.

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

The situation on the left side of the graph is quite predictable. But the peaks in the cost in the right part are interesting - these are the football leagues of Portugal and Belgium. The high transfer fee of the Portuguese league is probably due to a larger share of expensive Latin American players in this championship, compared with leagues in other countries. But what happens in Belgium? This is the ninth cost 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 team of Iceland.

At the tournament, seven league donors - at Euro 2016, their championships are represented by more players than the national team borrows from the championships of other countries. These are the first seven leagues in the previous chart, from England to Russia. For example, you might think that the English football championship ahead is mainly due to the national 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 troika from the championships of Germany, Italy and Spain, in that order, taking into account the previous indicators. It is worth noting Turkey, which according to these schedules is inferior to France only in the transfer cost of the league.

The transfer value of players of national championships, speakers at Euro 2016

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

We exclude from the previous schedule such players who play in the same national championship which team they represent. We get the following result

In the last chart for the championship of England, players of the Belgian, French and Spanish national teams take the first roles, instead of the players of the football associations of the regions adjacent to England.
The League of Spain goes to a clean second place. Thus, the transfer fee of the only player of the Wales national team playing in the Spanish Championship is slightly less than the cost of 20 Wales national football players from the English Championships.
The German League ranks third, confidently ahead of the Italian league.
Note that the leagues of France and Turkey are not significantly different again.
At the expense of 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, the share of the Portuguese league is greatly compressed. The Russian football league consistently holds the seventh place.

Time is up, the match is over!

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