⚽ The 'Big Five' leagues dominate men's club football — but still don't provide all the talent

At the margins

Welcome to the 25th edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.

If you missed the previous edition, you can read it here:

Dreams and nightmares

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Ahead of the FIBA World Cup in August, I looked at how the sources of top talent in the NBA were beginning to reflect basketball’s popularity across the world. In this week’s brief post, I applied the same type of analysis to men’s football — with some interesting results.

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The 'Big Five' leagues dominate men's club football — but still don't provide all the talent

If I asked you to write down the names of the best 50 men’s footballers of the last 30 years, I’d imagine a lot of players would run through your head before you got to Portuguese full-back João Cancelo.

In football, it’s a shame that we don’t have something as definitive as men’s basketball’s annual All-NBA selection to adjudicate such an argument.

But that’s not the same as having nothing to go on.

I’ll let

Ryan O'Hanlon

explain:

“Each month, a group of European soccer magazines (known as the European Sports Media) vote on a team of the month. It's the most consistent record we have of how players in Europe are generally viewed in a given moment…And after the season is over, you can add up the total TOTM appearances to get a sense of who people thought the best players were — in other words, a team of the season. Although not acknowledged as such, it's like soccer's version of the All-NBA team or the NFL's All-Pro squad.”

And, by the ESM’s criteria, Cancelo comfortably deserves a spot in the top 50.

He has received 15 monthly selections in total — more than great modern full-backs like Jordi Alba (13), Maicon (12) and Marcelo (11)¹.

The former Man City player — who came through the ranks at Benfica in Portgual — is also illustrative of an interesting trend that emerges from the aggregation of this data.

Despite the utter dominance of the ‘Big Five’ leagues² — England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — talent at the top of men’s club football continues to come from a diverse range of sources.

In fact, if anything, other parts of Europe are providing even more elite talent than they used to.

Over the last five seasons, players from European countries other than the ‘Big Five’³ have featured in the ESM ‘team of the season’ 24 times. The previous best five-year stretch on record for this group of countries was 18 selections between 2011 and 2015.

Cancelo dropped out of the ESM’s team of the season in 2022-23 after losing favour with Man City manager Pep Guardiola, but featured in the two preceding editions.

Now at Barcelona, a player “who is nominally a right-back but is doing much more than that” will be hoping he can break back in.

He’s joyful to watch on and off the ball, as he showed in Barça’s comeback win last weekend.

And — in the absence of any sort of official recognition — he will be able to take consolation in turning the heads of some European magazine editors if he does return to form.

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You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here

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1. It’s worth saying here that comparing numbers of monthly selections across position groups isn’t really fair, given that Messi and Ronaldo (to a lesser extent) were near-automatic selections in forward positions during the 2010s.

2. ClubElo — which we used earlier this year to look at Brighton’s rise through English football — estimates the strength of an average team in every men’s league in Europe; the gap between the fifth- and sixth-strongest leagues is roughly equivalent to the gap between the first- and fifth-strongest leagues.

3. Kevin De Bruyne of Belgium and Robert Lewandowski of Poland are the outstanding players in this category; De Bruyne has been in the last four teams of the season, and Lewandowski in three of the last four.