This project aims to analyse which countries provide the best players to the English Premier League. This analysis will be made by taking into account the amount of points that team is able to achieve after each signings. The EPL is the oldest and most important football league in the world and it’s time to see where the teams should look to get the best players.
2 data sets will be analysed. The first one contains all the English signings of the last decade and the other one contains the EPL standings and statistics by team for the last 20 years. We will clean the data and make some spatial visualizations using Python in a Jupiter notebook.
After cleaning and merging the data I had a good data frame to work with.
This first graph shows the average age of each country’s signing. Most of the countries provide players between 20 and 25 years old. We see some exceptions but those particular countries provided few players what makes this analysis not that significant given than 1 can change a lot their country’s average.
This two graphs show the evolution of the points made by all the signings of each year divided by country. As we can see, the EPL relied a lot on the English leagues to sign new players in the year 2000 but in 2022 it is very different. Spain, France, Italy and Germany have gained a lot of importance in recent years providing players to top performing teams and this will continue to be the trend for the next decades if the evolution keeps this growing pace.
This three maps try to explain the correlation between the countries we mentioned before. Spain is the country that has provided the most amount of players to the EPL and also the country that their signings have achieved the most amount of points in the league the season they were signed. France and Italy are very close in both maps and Germany right behind. We see that the rest of the world is quite far in number terms from this four. In the last map there is something quite surprising because the country that have made the most amount of money selling players is France followed closely by Spain and then Germany being Italy the last in this list of four.
This graph shows the correlation between the price of each signing and the evolution of the last 22 years. There are less signings in the last years because it’s becoming very common to leave players on loan. That make sense for the club owning the player because they won’t have to pay their salary and for the club receiving the player because they won’t have to buy a player they cannot. It is also important to notice that the cheapest signing of recent years has been increasing and that is possibly another reason why every year there are less signings.
Finally this is the analysis between the price paid for each signing and the performance of their team in the EPL that season. The most expensive signings struggle to get great performances in the first year after their signing while some of the cheapest manage to do very good. Most expensive signings achieve 50 points or less which is only good to get in the top 10 or worse. The best two signings were some of the most expensive but that is an exception. It is also worth mentioning that the worst performing players are usually very cheep although not always.
CONCLUSION
The English Premier League needs other countries to provide the best players to keep it’s status as the best league in the world. Spain, France, Germany and Italy are very important allies to continue growing the EPL and they are becoming more important every day with big signings moving from this countries to the U.K..
The price of signings has been increasing and that is why some clubs opt for the loan option. This option is expected to keep growing specially for clubs struggling financially.
The price of the signings not always have to do with the performance of the team that same year. There are other variables that clubs have to take into account if they want the perfect signing.
