Assessing the Data: Premier League Imports

"It’s easy to make broad generalizations about the different major European leagues."

The English Premier League is more physical. Spain’s La Liga is more technical. Italy’s Serie A is more defensive. Germany’s Bundesliga is more offensive. France’s Ligue 1 is the Premier League’s farm league. These are assumptions – and prejudices – we build up from simply watching the game.

It’s much more difficult to quantify these league’s differences however. In Chris Anderson and David Sally’s 2013 book The Numbers Game we find that the surface figures don’t differ too dramatically from league to league. The potential for a certain scoreline are roughly the same among the bigger leagues. Total goals and shots occur at a more or less consistent rate. From a relatively shallow perspective, these perceived differences simply don’t exist.

More recent deeper statistical approaches to possible differences are more encouraging, however. Dustin Ward’s excellent recent piece over at Statsbomb is just one example. Tactical preferences and the quality of youth programs do seem to have an impact on how the game is played from place to place. Incorporating this understanding into coaching programs, understanding where you or an opponent are strongest and weakest, might end up eventually having an impact on that surface data Anderson and Sally cite.

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There might yet be another way we can see the difference between the leagues. How do players from each country perform when they move between leagues? Their relative ability – or inability – to translate success in one league into another might say something about the differences between the leagues.

By way of example, let’s look at all the incoming transfers to the Premier League from summer 2010 through January 2015 and see if we can notice any trends. You can find all of the raw data compiled by originating league on this spreadsheet. Player names and transfer fees taken from Transfer League. All other data sourced from WhoScored and Transfermarkt. Players that failed to make any appearances for their club have been excluded.

It should be noted before we look into these numbers that this research is still very much a work-in-progress. The conclusions we draw below are therefore preliminary at best.

Perhaps the first thing we notice is that players coming directly from Serie A into the Premier League have a pretty dismal record, especially compared to the other leagues. Fifteen of the thirty transfer over the time period have moved on, of which ten were released from their clubs outright. That high release rate contributes greatly to the average loss of £2.26 million per player. We also notice that, of the four source leagues, Serie A tends to export more defensively-minded players to the Premier League.

Spain’s dominance of international and club football around the turn of the decade is expressed vividly in the Premier League’s dealings with La Liga. Fifty one players have been brought to England for an average cost of £11.4 million, making La Liga the most popular and expensive big league in Europe for the Premier League. They’ve stuck around most often too; only about 18% of players were released outright, and those that were sold actually generated a meager profit.

The Bundesliga’s perceived penchant for offensive bears out in the league’s sales to the EPL. English clubs are more likely to buy more offensively-minded players from the Bundesliga from any other big European league. They’ve done so at a premium: they paid £1.9 million per goal and assist produced by those players, a price higher than any other league represented on the spreadsheet.

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France’s Ligue 1 is the second most popular source for the Premier League’s foreign recruits after La Liga, though they are on average the cheapest at £6.16 per head. Despite costing almost £5 million less than their La Liga counterparts, Ligue 1 players have thus far averaged a similar number of appearances. It therefore makes sense that players from Ligue 1 tend to be sold on – for an overall profit – from the Premier League at a higher rate. Their consistency only raises their value, thus making them attractive targets.

Overall, we can see the hallmarks of some of those initial generalizations. Serie A exports more defensively-minded players than any other league represented. We can perhaps infer that the individual technical ability present in La Liga has inflated their costs a bit. German goal-getters are favored. Ligue 1’s high representation and low cost goes a long way to living up to their farm system stereotype.

There are some surprises here too.

Though goals and assists are by no means a perfect metric for indicating quality, Serie A’s cost per goal and assist is the lowest of the four leagues.

Intriguingly, La Liga’s positional ratio isn’t much greater than Italy’s. The fact that La Liga players still managed to contribute the most goals or assists per appearance perhaps hints at a well-rounded quality to players reared in Spain.

The overall modest representation of Bundesliga players might also be linked to German clubs’ tendency to be more financially secure and thus less enthusiastic about selling. Indeed, slowly but surely Bundesliga clubs are joining the Premier League in becoming primarily an import league.

We might assume too that French exports might be more squad players than superstars (Eden Hazard aside). Their relatively low cost and positive resell value attest to the Premier League’s role as something like Ligue 1’s finishing school.

There are undoubtedly plenty of errors and false assumptions made with these numbers. As said above, the research here is ongoing. At the very least, though, we can see a pattern emerging that more or less meets our expectations. Next steps might include adding a sheet for the Championship and perhaps a collective one for Europe’s lesser leagues. The concluding numbers at the bottom of each sheet are likely temporary. For now they represent part of a thus far incomplete – and likely foolhardy – attempt to find an overall number to attach to each league’s transfer value in the Premier League.

Thanks for reading and, by all means, please feel free to correct any errors or stomp on any conclusions made herein.