Finding Top Soccer players with Python and Tableau
I always wanted to publish articles on a variety of topics but I never could find a theme where I could contribute uniquely. My interests revolve around Tech, Biz and Soccer. So to give a stab, I thought to which are the commonly found datasets on the internet and came across FIFA ratings of all the players for the last 6–7 years.
FIFA ratings were always of particular interest as they were able to rank footballers quite similar to Chess. While Chess results are quite predictable i.e Win, Lose or Tie, Soccer games have a lot of variations where you can win with a large margin, lose with a small margin, home side advantages need to be considered etc. Soccer players performance is monitored almost every minute of their matches and under different scenarios e.g International and Club Play, adding a ton of complications for even a single player.
While I’m not going in detail of how ratings are calculated what interests me, in particular, is which conditions help you to be a good soccer player. So I have taken the dataset of FIFA Ratings 2016- 2020, please note 2020 ratings is the performance of the year 2018–2019 season. Why 4 years of data? Well, FIFA World Cup happens every 4 years and it is sufficient time to judge an average player’s performance. Since the dataset is very large (almost 4000 players every year) I have taken the only Top 100 players of every year and tried to see what actually made them be in the Top 100. I used Python for cleaning and segregating and Tableau for Visualizations. Well, most of the conclusions were as much as expected but there were quite a few surprises so stay tuned!
1. Top 100 sum of ratings YOY
We see that the Sum of the Top 100 soccer players increase YOY which means the top players are getting better and better every year.
2. Which country are you from?
Even though Germany had some of the top players as per FIFA ratings but they could not even make it to the Round of 16 of FIFA World Cup 2018. Similarly, Argentina, Brazil and Spain got eliminated in the Round of 16.
Belgium made it to the semifinals while France eventually won the FIFA World Cup 2018. The best contradiction is of Croatia which made it to the finals and eventually becoming the Runners Up.
This seems to be supporting the idea of why some countries with Top Players sometimes perform very poorly during the World Cup. It’s true that individual ratings are not the only thing which matters in Football. Teamwork and Leadership also play a key integral role in the game.
3. How about your Club?
The data matches quite well with individual results since most of these clubs have been winning the league titles and also were in the knock-out phases of Champions League. So Top players in your team actually help you to win the league titles and other Club Trophies.
Liverpool seems to be like the only outlier as they were the runners-up in Season 2017–2018 Champions League and eventually became the winners in 2018- 2019 Champions League.
4. What is the Average Height and Weight?
Seems like football players are very fit and they have an average height of 6ft. Height helps them to take headers and also receive the ball more quickly by jumping higher on the air.
Well, it is not mandatory to have an excellent height as you guys pretty much know whom I’m referring too.
5. How about your Jersey Number?
7, 9, 10 are of mostly forwards and that means that area is more competitive and that’s why the best are usually forwards. No wonder there are Players who fight for the Jersey Number 10. 1 is usually a goalkeeper and 4 usually goes to a defender.
6. Do Age and Ratings have a correlation?
Well, it’s true that older Soccer players are not much preferred and slowly start shifting to Tier -2 clubs for more game time. Many Football clubs have now gone solely to invest in their young academy players. Ajax is a good example where the Captain of the team, De Ligt was only 19 years old. Age still seems to be a controversial topic among a lot of clubs.
Though the trend line shows that there is an inverse relationship between age and overall ratings, the total dataset is still very low to assert it as a perfect correlation.
The sweet-spot seems to be the age 25 to 32 where the maximum of the top players are and attain the peak.
7. How does Height help you in Soccer?
FIFA Ratings have a split on various skills. We will try to find the relation between that particular skill with the Footballer’s Height. Do note that we can’t assert it as a perfect correlation because of lack of data.
Let’s go into 2 sets of skills. The first being SP( Speed), DB(Dribbling), DF(Defending). I always had a hunch that short players will have better dribbling and speed because of the low centre mass of their body. From the graphs, we can see a small opposite relation between the two metrics while it being opposite with Defending.
Defending actually improves if you are able to receive long balls and intercept players in both cases Height does play a key advantage.
In the second set, we cover skills like PASS( Passing), ST(Shooting) and PHY(Physical). Similarly, we can see the opposite trend for Passing and Shooting which is decreasing as Height increases and In the case of physical strength, it is completely opposite which is true.
8. How do the Top 10 differ with respect to others under different criteria?
We have always wondered what makes the best, “The Best”. So I thought to divide this section into two parts. In the first part, I will try to cover mainly Forwards, Midfielders and Defenders, and Goalkeepers in the second part.
1. Forwards, Midfielders and Defenders
We see that the Top 10 have compromised their defending with higher speed and dribbling. No wonder we see that the most popular Jersey numbers are 10 and 9. We also see that higher speed and dribbling has nothing to do with Height which makes Soccer an even more fair game unlike Basketball and other sports where your physique also plays a big role in determining your success.
2. Goalkeepers
We will try to look into the following skills for the goalkeepers:-DIV- Diving, HD- Handling, KCK- Kicking, POS- Positioning, RF- Reflexes and SP- Speed.
There seems to be no secret sauce for the goalkeepers and the Top 10 have just improved on all their skills to be the best.
Conclusion
Well, if you are a football fan most of these results were already in your back of your minds but It is always fun to back it up with data analysis for surety. To me what makes Soccer the most beautiful game is because it is one of the fairest games in terms of getting trained to be the best. All you need is just a ball to get out and play and it does not even matter if you are alone on the ground:)
