Archive for EPL

Interview with Simon Kuper, author of Soccernomics

June 23, 2012 Ravi Ramineni 2 comments

In this special podcast recorded for Forza Futbol, we have Simon Kuper, author of the recently published Soccernomics 2nd edition.
Simon is also the author of “Football Against the Enemy”, “Ajax, the Dutch, the War” among others. Simon writes a weekly column in Financial Times.

Click here for all the books of Simon.

Simon joined me from Ukraine to answer a few questions about the Soccernomics second edition, state of Soccer analytics, Soccer in USA and some current topics like the new Premier League TV deal.

Interview length : ~25 minutes


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Here are a few quotes from what we discussed.

1. What do you think of Euro 2012 so far?

“Soccer has been great, players seem more relaxed than at world cup. Euro is less important so it has been more fun.”

Soccernomics

2. Why 2nd Edition

3. What is going on at Liverpool?

“I think nobody quite knows what a Moneyball of soccer will be. I think that was the problem at Liverpool”

About the new management set-up at Liverpool

“Liverpool management is using wisdom of crowds”

4. Technical director role in England

5. Do coaches matter ? What impact does the style of play of a coach have on the performance of the team and how does it manifest into the coach’s rating?

“Identity of the coach is not as important as people think”

“The idea that the coach is this great motivator, I dismiss. The idea that he is this great tactician, a few not many”

6. Who are the top tacticians in the game today?

“I think Wengers great gift is recruiting rather than tactics, probably true with Ferguson as well”

“One problem with successful managers like Mourinho & Louis Van Gaal is they egomaniacs. They think they know it all”

7. What is your take on Pep Guardiola?

“Guardiola created this system of very elaborate rules almost like an NFL playbook”

8. Soccer clubs dont make money  : What is the objective of financial fair-play rules?

Soccer Analytics

“In areas like freekicks, corners and penalties, data has already become extremely significant in Soccer”

9. Houston Rockets GM Daryl Moorey – Analysts are a commodity and what matters is the data? what do think of that when most clubs are using the same data?

“I think the problem in football is that clubs dont know how to analyse data”

10. Power of agents – We recently did a post on the power of agents in football and found out that 50% of all the players of EPL are represented by 20 player agencies

- What impact does this have on the efficiencies in the transfer market?

 Current Issues

11. The new premier league deal  3bill pounds for 2013 – 2016 (it doesnt include Overseas rights) – are you surprised by the size of it? How can you explain that in this tough financial climate?

12. What this mean for other leagues? – do you think this will create a bubble like we saw a decade ago?

“The EPL is becoming the NBA of soccer”

13. What does the Rangers demise mean to Scottish football?

“Football clubs never disappear. Soccer can survive with less money.”

Soccer in USA

14. How far do you think USA has come as a soccer country?

“US now is the most soccer country it has ever been”

15. What are the 3 things that you would change in US soccer if you had the power?

“getting american 7-years olds to think in terms of space”

16. What is your next book going to be about?

Also listen to our interview with Prof. Stefan Szymanski, co-author of Soccernomics.

We thank Simon a lot for his time. As always, it was great listening to his insights and sharing them.

English Premier League, EPL, Euro 2012, Football Agents, Football Finances, Soccer Analytics, Sports Business, USMNT , , , , , , , ,

Agents in Football – Focus on EPL

May 24, 2012 Ravi Ramineni 2 comments

Club football seasons across most of Europe have ended. The lack of serious football (apart from the Euro 2012 in a few weeks) means the off-field stuff like transfer rumors and player agents take the center stage. Recent news items like the deal of Bebe to Manchester United highlight the inefficiencies and the lack of transparency in the transfer market.

In the first post of a series of posts on this topic, we take an in-depth look at the top player agencies in the English Premier League over the past 5 years.

Data

- All data is taken from the website Transfermarkt.

- The agent information is not available for about 38.9% of the total number of players. However they accounted for only 15.7% of the overall market value.
This number includes players

  • whose market value is low
  • who have retired over the past 5 years and
  • who have agents but the information is not available

- We have excluded the set of data with no agent info unless explicitly stated.

Assumption

- Players rarely change agents. They change teams much more often.

 Methodology

-          Histograms of Agent-Club linkage based on:

  • # of players of a team having the same agent
  • Total market value of players of a given agent who play for the same team

-          Visualized Agent-Club relationship using heat maps

Figure 1:  Histograms – Breakdown by Market Value per Agent (in Mil)

 

Figure 2: Histogram – Total player per agent

Histogram of % of players per agent

Figure 3: Histogram of player % and market value %

 

Observations

  • More than 50% of the players and the market value of the transfer market are controlled by a handful of agents.
  • 20 agencies control 50% of the player transfer market. The other 50% is made up of 279 agencies.
  • Some agents have very few clients but who are super stars. The % of market value is disproportionate to the # of players in their clientele.A good example of this is Gestifute, the agency run by Jorge Mendes, the agent of the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Nani et al. Gestifute is ranked 5th in market value map but only 11th in the player count map. See the histogram of player % & market value %. Another example is Pinhas Zahavi, agent of Carlos Tevez.

Figure 4: Heat Map of Agent-Club by player count

Figure 5: Heat Map of Agent-Club by market value

Figure 6: Heat map by % of players of a team with an agent. (Players whose agent info is unavailable has been included in this calculation)

 

Figure 7: Player Percentage per team sorted by the highest % of players of a team with the same agent.

Observations

  • 10 – Maximum number of players of the same club with the same agent. Sunderland & Stellar Football. (Figure 4 – C)
  • € 145.5m – The highest amount of market value of players of a team linked to the same agent. Manchester United and Gestifute. (Figure 5 – E)
  • 27 – Stellar Football’s players played in 27 of the 29 EPL teams over the last 5 years. This is the maximum number. (Figure 4 – D)
  • 103 – Total number of Stellar Football’s players who played in EPL over the past 5 years (Figure 4 – D)
  • 6 – Arsenal has the highest # & % of players without an agent among the players whose agent info is available. There could be more players with no agents among the players who agent info is not available. (Figure 4- A,6)
  • 14 – EPL clubs dealt with a 14.15 agents on an average over the last 5 years. The Median is 14. (Figure 7)
  • 22 – Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Portsmouth
    have the highest diversity of agents over the past 5 seasons. Fulham is a close second with 21. (Figure 7 – G)
  • 5 – Norwich City and Swansea City with 6 have the least diversity of agents among their player ranks. Both teams were promoted to the EPL at the beginning of this season. (Figure 7 – H)
  • The differences between the market value heat map to player count heat map are due to the fact that some agencies (e.g.: Gestifute, Pinhas Zahavi) have a lot of average-to-good players as clients’ vs. others who have only a few clients but are superstars. (Figure 4 – B, 5 – E, 5 – F)
  • In the player count heat map the relationship between Gestifute & Chelsea appears very strong. When Mourinho was the coach at Chelsea, all the Portuguese players at Chelsea (e.g.: Carvalho, Paulo Ferreira, Deco) were represented by Jorge Mendes’s agency. (Figure 4 – B)
  • On a similar note Gestifute has a strong relationship with Manchester United in the market value heat map. This is due to the astronomical market value of Cristiano Ronaldo. (Figure 5 – E)

In the next post we will further analyze the linkage between clubs & agents and also look at other leagues.

Glossary

Top Agents in EPL:

Stellar Football Ltd – David Manasseh, Jonathan Barnett, Ertan Göksu

Base Soccer Agency – Frank Trimboli, Leon Angel           

James Grant Sports Management – Craig Sharon, Lyle Yorks

World in Motion – Andy Evans, Bill Pethybridge, James Lippett, Freddy Akehurst et al

Key Sports Management – John Colquhoun

Gestifute – Jorge Mendes, Luis Correia

Data Visualization, EPL, Football Agents , , , , , ,

Putting into perspective the spending of Manchester City

April 30, 2012 Ravi Ramineni One comment

If you are not from the blue half of Manchester, any discussion that involves Manchester City quickly boils down to buying titles.

A few weeks ago when City played Arsenal at the Emirates, there was this banner:

With the Manchester Derby looming on Monday, there are a slew of articles centered on arguments like buying titles and class.

I don’t know how to quantify “class”. However, I wanted to analyze how Manchester City’s spending stacks up with the rest of the contenders in the Premier League.

Methodology:

1. Compared the inflation adjusted spending numbers from 1999-2011 of United, City, Arsenal, Spurs and Liverpool.

2. I used the Consumer Price Index based inflation numbers of the GBP for the first round of analysis.

But Football transfer fee inflation is hard to measure.  It can fluctuate much more because unlike CPI based inflation (which is based on the price changes of a basket of goods), Football transfers form a very niche segment in a niche industry.

3. I did another view of the data using the definition of inflation based on the average annual transfer fee in the Premier League from the site Transfer Price Index
A quote from the TPI article summarizes why CPI based inflation rate might not be a good indicator of the football player transfer fee inflation
“The cumulative Transfer Price Index is running at 730% for the 20 year history of the Premier League compared to a Bank of England cumulative Consumer Price Index of 77.1%.”

4. I overlaid the spending patterns of Real Madrid & FC Barcelona who are two very successful clubs in Europe and regularly buy top players.

5. I also looked at the Deloitte Money League rankings over the past 10 years to visualize the size of Manchester City before and after the takeover by Sheikh Mansour.

Data:

1. All the transfer price data is taken from the site www.transfermarkt.com. All prices in millions of Euros.
2. The CPI inflation numbers are taken from the Bank of England.
3. Used the average transfer fee chart from the Transfer Price Index
4. Deloitte Money League rankings of the past 10 years from Deloitte website via  Sarah Rudd

Play with the Interactive Visualization of the TPI & CPI based transfer spend from 1999 to 2011.

TPI based transfer spend 1999-2011

CPI based transfer spend 1999-2011

Play with the Interactive Visualization of the TPI & CPI based transfer spend from 1999 to 2011.

Observations:

Club Overall Spending 1999-2011 (€ mil) Overall Spending 1999-2007 (€ mil)
Chelsea 1399.46 1196.35
Manchester City 679.70 (2nd) 195.17 (5th)
Spurs 556.63 501.81
Liverpool 486.75 431.9
Manchester United 426.07 431.61
Arsenal 63.3 93
  • City spent a net total of € 679 mil on transfers from 1999 to 2011, higher than everyone else except Chelsea.
  • However before City got taken over the Abu Dhabi United Group their overall spending is significantly less than everyone except Arsenal.
  • The average end-of-season league position of City from 1999-2007 was 14.7. After the takeover in 2008, the average league position of City is 5 (including 2011-12). An impressive improvement in such a short span of time.
  • Teams like Manchester United, Liverpool and Spurs have a longer history of spending. This makes City’s spending in a compressed time-frame look exaggerated.
  • Chelsea did something similar between 2002 and 2005 to break into the top 4.

Comparing City to United

There is no doubt that City has spent a lot more than United between 1999 and 2011.

However if you discount the sales of extraordinary* sales of Cristiano Ronaldo & David Beckham to Real Madrid, the overall numbers will be lot closer. (*extraordinary sales are explained below)

City United
Overall net spend 1999-2011 € 679 mil € 426 mil
Excluding Ronaldo & Beckham € 679 mil € 647 mil

Here is a list of top transfers of United between 1999 and 2011 with inflation adjusted prices.
Criteria: TPI adjusted price greater than or equal to 30 mil euros.

Season Player Bought Actual price TPI adjusted CPI Adjusted
(€ mil)
2001-02 Juan Veron 42.6 71.1 58.4
Van Nistelrooy 28.5 47.6 39
2002-03 Rio Ferdinand 46 95.7 62.1
2003-04 Cristiano Ronaldo 17.5 43.2 22.7
Louis Saha 17.5 43.2 22.7
2004-05 Rooney 37 84 47
2006-07 Carrick 27.2 59 32.4
2007-08 Anderson 31.5 45 36.2
Nani 25.5 36.5 29.3
Hargreaves 25 35.7 28.7

In contrast there are only very few big sales that they have made a lot of money off of.

Season Player Sold Actual price TPI adjusted CPI Adjusted
(€ mil)
2001-02 Jaap Stam 25.7 43 35.3
2003-04 Beckham 37.5 93.7 48.7
Veron 22.5 56.2 29.2
2009-10 Ronaldo 94 117.5 104.4
  • The Cristiano Ronaldo’s sale is an extraordinary sale as was Beckham deal on its day. In both cases the buyer was Real Madrid under Florentino Perez.
  • Beckham’s price was driven-up because of Perez openly touting his “Galactico policy” of signing the hottest player on the market each year during his tenure.
  • Cristiano Ronaldo’s price was driven up because one of the election promises of Perez was to sign Ronaldo. This meant Manchester United had all the leverage during the negotiations.

These are extraordinary scenarios that don’t happen on a regular basis.

Here is a list of top transfers of City over this period of time.
Criteria: TPI adjusted price greater than or equal to 30 mil euros.

Player Bought Actual price TPI adjusted CPI Adjusted
(€ mil)
2002-03 Nicolas Anelka 19.8 41.2 26.7
2008-09 Robinho 43 42.1 47.3
2009-10 Carlos Tevez 29 36.2 32.2
E. Adebayor 29 36.2 32.2
J. Lescott 27.5 34.4 30.5
2010-11 Edin Dzeko 37 38.5 38.8
Yaya Toure 30 31.2 31.5
Mario Balotelli 29.5 30.7 312
David Silva 28.75 29.9 30.2
2011-12 Kun Aguero 45 45 45
Season Player Sold Actual price TPI adjusted CPI Adjusted
(€ m
2005-06 S. Wright-Phillips 31.5 71.5 38.7

Conclusions:

  1. City has spent a lot but the compressed time-frame of the spending makes it look exaggerated.
  2. City made up almost 10 positions in their average league finish from 14.7 to 5 after the takeover.
  3. Apart from Arsenal, all other top 4 contenders have been spending regularly over a longer period of time.
  4. Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group took over Manchester City in August of 2008. But Man City was ranked thrice in the top 20 of the Deloitte Money League even before the takeover. This shows that they have always had a sound financial base and fan support.

    Deloitte Money League rankings of City from 2001-201
Year Revenue Matchday Broadcasting Commercial Ranking
2001 54 NA NA NA NR
2002 43 NA NA NA NR
2003 71 NA NA NA NR
2004 94 NA NA NA 16
2005 90 22.3 38.7 29.1 17
2006 89.4 22.7 35 31.7 17
2007 85 NA NA NA NR
Post-takeover by Abu Dhabi United Group
2008 104 23.4 54.6 26 NR
2009 102.2 24.4 56.7 21.1 19
2010 152.8 29.8 66 57 11
2011 169.6 29.5 76.1 64 12

Other observations:

  1. Chelsea’s total spending curve is a surprise. It is common knowledge that Abramovich had spent a lot in early 2000s but the total amount is staggering.They are on par with Real Madrid over the 12 years. The only difference being the steep slope between 2002 and 2005 vs. a fairly linear spending pattern of Real Madrid.
  2. Arsenal is the only club that seems to be consciously balancing the books year after year. Their curve oscillates year to year.
  3. Similar to the steep slope in Chelsea’s curve between 2002 and 2005 is the steep slope in City’s curve between 2006 and 2010 but not nearly as steep.
  4. Real Madrid and FC Barcelona spend a lot of money annually, especially the former.
  5. For all the hype surrounding “La Masia”, FC Barcelona spent as much as Manchester City between 1999 and 2011.
Data Visualization, EPL, Manchester City, Manchester United, Sports Business, Tableau, Transfer Spend , , , , ,

Goal Glut November Update

November 29, 2011 Sarah Rudd 2 comments

There was an interesting article this morning on Soccernet about Robin Van Persie being in the “injury red zone”.  Hyperbole aside, it raises the point that Arsenal have had the luxury of playing Van Persie in every league match so far (starting 12 of 13) but will have to manage his workload a little more conservatively or risk a decrease in performance or potential injury.  Arsenal aren’t the only club facing this problem, with many top clubs still involved in multiple competitions (Newcastle’s and Liverpool’s league form is probably benefiting from their absence from Europe).

Why do I bring it up?  After much hype about the goal glut in the Premier League this season, things are starting to quiet down.  Goals per match dropped from 3.3 in October to 2.87 in November which is expected based on previous years’ data.  If this season continues to be like others, we can expect the dip to continue through February.

Goals per match by month for the Premier League from 2005-present. Orange marks are for the current season. The grey area represents one standard deviation from the mean.

 

Looking at how total goals are progressing, this season isn’t much different from previous seasons.

Running total of goals in the Premier League. Orange is this season.

We have a decent idea of what is going on here (goal scoring pace slows in the middle of the season) but we don’t know why.  Is fatigue and squad rotation responsible?  It certainly is an interesting theory to investigate.

Analytics, EPL

Goal Glut in the Premier League?

November 4, 2011 Sarah Rudd One comment

There has been lots of talk about the goal glut that is happening in the Premier League right now.  Are pricey strikers to blame or is it the death of quality defense?  Decision Technology’s Ian Graham has already taken a look at debunking the Guardian’s piece on the “goal glut”.  I thought I’d add my two cents.

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Analytics, EPL, Statistics

Patterns in Offensive/Defensive Metrics

October 10, 2011 Sarah Rudd No comments

Previously I’ve written about examining conversion rates and shots as a way of examining which areas an offense or defense excels at or is struggling with. Shots can be a crude estimation for opportunities and conversion rate and estimation of how well a team executes on those opportunities. I had looked at offense and defense separately in the past, but decided to combine the two to see if any interesting patterns emerged. I represented the difference as a vector, with the magnitude (length of the line) representing how much of an advantage a team had and the angle representing how much opportunities or execution contributed to that advantage. Since one of the emerging stories of the season is the high number of shots Manchester United is conceding, I thought it would be interesting to see how this season stacks up compared to the previous season.

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Analytics, EPL, Offensive Production

Where Does Talent Come From? — La Liga Edition

August 15, 2011 Sarah Rudd 2 comments

Map of birthplaces for players currently in La Liga (excluding Spain)

This is our second post in our series on the origins of players — previously we looked at the Premier League.  La Liga is little different from the Premier League, both in terms of infrastructure (“B” squads can compete in lower divisions) and culturally (Athletic Bilbao has a policy to only sign players from the Basque region).  The methodology for obtaining this data is discussed in our previous post. And now, the highlights:

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Analytics, Barcelona, EPL, Real Madrid, Statistics, Youth

Football Factories: Where does talent come from?

August 8, 2011 Sarah Rudd 6 comments

Going global: Birthplaces of Premier League players (excluding UK).

Another summer is on its way out with Arsenal barely making a splash in the transfer market. Once again it looks like Arsenal will be relying on youth this season. It got me thinking — are Arsenal really good at producing players from their youth academy who are capable of playing in the Premier League?

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Analytics, Data Visualization, EPL, Statistics, Tableau, Youth

Comparing the Top 100 Salaries from MLS and Europe

June 7, 2011 Sarah Rudd One comment

I recently added an interactive graph of MLS salary info to the site but I haven’t done much with the data since then.  With the summer transfer window opening and fans debating whether or not it is worth it for their MLS club to import expensive Designated Players, I decided to take a look at how the top earners in MLS compare to their European counterparts.  Top 100 European and MLS Salaries

  • David Beckham, Thierry Henry and Rafael Marquez still earn a salary that would be competitive with the biggest stars in Europe.
  • Only 7 players in MLS earn more than $1million a season, while the majority of the top 100 earn $250,000 or less.
  • Cristiano Ronaldo earns roughly $340,000 a week, which is more than all but 21 MLS players earn in an entire season.
  • David Beckham earns $250,000 in two weeks, more than all but 38 MLS players earn in an entire season,

Not surprisingly, European players earn considerably more than their MLS counterparts (excluding Beckham, Henry and Marquez).  When you compare the weekly wage of a European player with the annual wage of an MLS player, parity starts to emerge.

Top European Wages Per Week vs Annual MLS Salaries

The top 100 European salaries can be found at Futebol Finance and the top MLS Salaries can be found at MLS Players Union.

Do you think MLS clubs are smart to shell out that sort of cash for veterans like Beckham and Henry or do you think the money is better spent elsewhere? Does wage disparity cause problems within the club?

Cristiano Ronaldo, Data Visualization, EPL, Futebol Finance, Major League Soccer, MLS, Sports Business

Financial Breakdown of the English Premier League

May 20, 2011 Sarah Rudd 2 comments

Earlier this week the Guardian Data Blog published financial data for the English Premier League. They chose to go with the obvious story about how in debt the clubs are (and it’s true, it doesn’t look good) while others have decided to look at the relationship between wins and wages (also true, there is a correlation between the two).  I decided to break things down a bit further to see if anything else interesting is going on.

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Analytics, EPL, Statistics
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