World Football Leagues Compared

[KingsX]

A new statistical effort from FiveThirtyEight, covering the top domestic league from each country:

 

                                                                                                                    Strength Based on:

Country                                         Confederation                     Inter-League                         Market                              OVERALL

                                                       Matches                          Values                        STRENGTH

 

 

 

 

Spain	UEFA	2.01	2.10	2.01
Germany	UEFA	1.89	1.88	1.89
England	UEFA	1.58	2.28	1.60
Italy	UEFA	1.48	1.89	1.50
Brazil	CONMEBOL	1.48	1.64	1.49
France	UEFA	1.51	1.01	1.49
Russia	UEFA	1.49	1.27	1.48
Argentina	CONMEBOL	1.48	0.71	1.45
Portugal	UEFA	1.18	1.16	1.18
Turkey	UEFA	1.11	1.16	1.12
Mexico	CONCACAF	1.12	0.93	1.09
Ukraine	UEFA	1.10	0.88	1.09
Switzerland	UEFA	1.07	0.75	1.06
Colombia	CONMEBOL	1.02	0.46	0.99
Belgium	UEFA	0.97	1.00	0.97
Paraguay	CONMEBOL	0.90		0.90
Austria	UEFA	0.86	0.59	0.84
Greece	UEFA	0.81	0.62	0.80
Ecuador	CONMEBOL	0.77	0.46	0.75
Netherlands	UEFA	0.71	1.05	0.73
Romania	UEFA	0.75	0.24	0.71
Chile	CONMEBOL	0.74	0.18	0.71
Sweden	UEFA	0.73	0.29	0.70
Czech Republic	UEFA	0.71	0.44	0.69
Poland	UEFA	0.63	0.21	0.60
Uruguay	CONMEBOL	0.60	0.15	0.58
Denmark	UEFA	0.59	0.38	0.57
USA	CONCACAF	0.54	0.66	0.56
Croatia	UEFA	0.55	0.49	0.55
Bolivia	CONMEBOL	0.53		0.53
Norway	UEFA	0.50	0.19	0.48
Kazakhstan	UEFA	0.40	0.27	0.39
Israel	UEFA	0.22	0.23	0.22
Scotland	UEFA	0.14	0.44	0.17
Slovakia	UEFA	0.19	-0.16	0.15
Belarus	UEFA	0.15	0.02	0.14
Panama	CONCACAF	0.07		0.07
Cyprus	UEFA	0.04	-0.30	0.02
Costa Rica	CONCACAF	0.09	-0.30	0.02
Azerbaijan	UEFA	0.01	-0.04	0.01
Peru	CONMEBOL	-0.06	-0.03	-0.06
Serbia	UEFA	-0.11	0.12	-0.09
Venezuela	CONMEBOL	-0.09	-0.11	-0.09
Bulgaria	UEFA	-0.15	0.27	-0.10
Slovenia	UEFA	-0.16	0.01	-0.14
Hungary	UEFA	-0.36	0.11	-0.29
Iceland	UEFA	-0.31	-0.69	-0.36
Ireland	UEFA	-0.28	-1.07	-0.40
Finland	UEFA	-0.45	-0.38	-0.44
El Salvador	CONCACAF	-0.46		-0.46
Bosnia	UEFA	-0.61	-0.03	-0.51
Honduras	CONCACAF	-0.61		-0.61
Guatemala	CONCACAF	-0.64		-0.64
Moldova	UEFA	-0.63	-0.88	-0.67
Albania	UEFA	-0.77	-0.30	-0.70
Georgia	UEFA	-0.79	-0.30	-0.71
Macedonia	UEFA	-0.74	-0.88	-0.76
Montenegro	UEFA	-0.99	-0.43	-0.87
Armenia	UEFA	-1.05	-0.42	-0.92
Latvia	UEFA	-1.46	-0.35	-1.27
Luxembourg	UEFA	-1.41	-0.84	-1.29
Malta	UEFA	-1.65	-0.63	-1.44
Wales	UEFA	-1.60	-0.88	-1.46
Estonia	UEFA	-1.67	-0.52	-1.47
Northern Ireland	UEFA	-1.63	-0.88	-1.48
Faroe Islands	UEFA	-1.70	-0.88	-1.54
Lithuania	UEFA	-2.08	-0.43	-1.69
Andorra	UEFA	-2.79	-0.88	-2.25

Sources: ESPN, Transfermarkt  (Not all leagues have market values on Transfermarkt)

[KingsX]

FiveThirtyEight is the (now ESPN owned) website famed for their statistical analysis and projections in US politics and sports.  They are now treading new waters: worldwide club football.  To enable projections in CL and EL matches, they have compiled a list rating the overall strength of many of the world’s leagues in what is claimed to be an apples-to-apples statistical format.

 

This is all based off just four esoteric metrics and, for many leagues, wildly incomplete data.  (As much as I personally don’t rate MLS, I would hope it’s not really twelve spots behind the freakin’ Paraguayan league.)  That said, there are plenty of data points among the major European leagues.  But it is not clear on how they weight friendlies compared to, say, Europa League ties.

 

Here is the meat of their explanation:

 

We’ve launched a big expansion of our soccer predictions here at FiveThirtyEight. We’re now forecasting 24 club soccer leagues, with two more — Champions League and Europa League — to come in a few weeks. We’ve added leagues from South America (Brasileirão and the Argentine Superliga), along with 14 new European leagues, including five second-tier leagues, such as the English Championship.

 

For the most part, the methodology behind our forecasts is the same as last year’s. We’re still using four metrics from each match — goals scored, adjusted goals, shot-based expected goals and non-shot expected goals — to evaluate team performances. Those evaluations are expressed as offensive and defensive ratings for each team. And those ratings, in turn, let us calculate win/loss/draw probabilities for future matches and simulate the season thousands of times to estimate each team’s chances of winning the title.

 

All our significant changes are in how we assess the relative strength of domestic leagues. The goal was to improve our forecasts for the Champions League and Europa League and to better compare clubs in different countries — say, Juventus in Italy to Ajax in the Netherlands. We’re using recent matches played between teams from different leagues, supplemented with league market values (from Transfermarkt), to assign a strength rating to every league that we’re forecasting. Our new league ratings also give us the ability to a calculate a global Soccer Power Index (SPI) rating for each team — a number from 0 to 100 that represents the overall strength of each team.

 

There aren’t too many surprises at the top; out of the five biggest European leagues, four are in the top five, with La Liga in Spain and the Bundesliga in Germany pretty far ahead of the pack. The Premier League in England, despite being the most valuable league in the world, has struggled to compete in the Champions League recently, and their match-based rating lags far behind their market value rating. Another league whose recent performance according to our ratings has lagged behind their market value is Major League Soccer in the U.S., whose last CONCACAF Champions League title was in 2000. MLS shows up in 28th place, between the Danish and Croatian leagues and a long way behind their regional rivals Liga MX in Mexico.

 

Our league strengths can be interpreted as a bonus (in goals) given to each team in an inter-league match. So, for example, if Real Madrid (league strength of 2.01) were playing PSG (league strength of 1.48) and Real Madrid were a 0.2 goal favorite based only on their domestic SPI ratings, our model would give Real Madrid an extra 0.53 goal bonus because of the difference in the two teams’ league strengths.

 

More details: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/whats-new-in-our-2017-18-club-soccer-predictions/

 

[the fox]

For me,la liga has the strongest top 3 teams, PL is the most fun and filled with quality even in the lower table teams, the ligue 1 is very enjoyable, the calcio is a technical driven league with less quality and more coaching ability and the German has the best underrated young players with amazing local development.