Syzygy Analytics

This week I have been working on incorporating player values into my algorithms that price up football games so I thought I could write a small piece with some related charts.

Thanks to http://www.transfermarkt.com for their excellent website!

Which teams in Europe’s big 5 leagues are over or underperforming their squad value?

I’m using each team’s performance in their national league with a league-by-league adjustment based on each leagues’ performance in the Champions League this season (this adjustment is England 0, Spain -0.55, Italy -0.75, France -0.75, Germany -0.95.  I’m not totally confident about these adjustments but won’t be a mile off.)

I’m also ‘correcting’ player value for age as younger players are generally not as good as their value implies while older players are better than their value implies.

Figure 1

The wealth of the Premier League is on show as 16 of the 20 teams this season have had a lineup valued at over €200 million while Spain, Italy, France and Germany have 4, 6, 2 and 3 respectively.

‘Performance level’ can be used to compare teams as it does not have individual meaning after the league strength adjustment (e.g. Bayern are just under 0.5 goals better per game than Barcelona but having a performance level of 0 on this graph doesn’t mean average in any way).

It will be interesting to check back on some of these numbers at a later data to see if the position of teams relative to the line has changed and whether key players at overperforming clubs are more valuable (whether they are still at that club or not).

Figure 2

Lille have had starting line ups average less than €10m per player but have been performing very nicely in Ligue 1.  Hakon Haraldsson and Matia Fernandez-Pardo are 2 young players who may be ones to watch.

Villarreal and Lens are also around the same area of the graph – Alberto Moleiro of Villarreal and Mamadou Sangare and Samson Baidoo of Lens may be more young players partly responsible for the current overperformance of their clubs.

Liverpool are big underperformers; this will be in part due to the highly valued Mo Salah not getting close to matching his very high-performance levels of last season.  Real Madrid are playing ok (even in some of the games they have not won) but their position on the graph is a function of their very high squad value and their performance value not being at the level of a few others.  German teams feature quite heavily in the underperformers list partly because of German performances in Europe that imply the league is not especially strong right now (not totally confident on this).

Premier League Squads

I have lined up each Premier League squad by value to compare them.

Figure 3

I find a good way to compare to make this more readable is to look at the rank of the value of each team’s highest value player, 2^nd highest value player e.t.c

Figure 4

Arsenal’s top few stars are not quite at the value of Liverpool’s and Manchester City’s, but their squad looks very deep and solid – they have the most valuable 5^th ‘best’ player, the most valuable 6^th ‘best’ player e.t.c

Brentford are solid performers so far this year given their lack of high value key players. 

Chelsea surprised me a bit, I thought their squad was stronger on paper than this.  I suppose they have a lot of players out on loan.  Everton may have one of the weaker benches (relative to starting 11) while Leeds looks like the opposite.

Tottenham are quite big underperformers compared to other teams given their squad (it’s quite deep) while Sunderland are the opposite.  Evaluating player value is a difficult thing to do so it may be that some teams have mis-valued players rather than they are coached better.

I hope to have more material using transfermarkt player values in the future so stay tuned for that.

I hope you have a good holidays wherever you are (if you have them!) and please subscribe using the white box on the main page if you’d like to be updated whenever I post.

Thanks for reading!