Luis Suarez, cultivator of chaos

Luis Suarez just can’t be stopped.

Despite claims to being the Premiership’s best player last season, the Liverpool forward has been nothing short of astonishing during 2013-14. A year ago he was creative – generating 5.7 shots per game – but perhaps a little profligate despite returns of 20 goals in 33 matches.

While his shot attempts have dipped slightly to 5.4/game, those attempts now realize 1.2 goals per contest.  Aided by a more embedded and threatening supporting cast, Luis Suarez is now more dangerous than during his prior lone wolf role. As you can see in the chart below, he is actually perhaps the devastating forward in Europe this term.

Alongside a similar sizeable increase from compatriot Daniel Sturridge (from 16% to 26%) and a very settled Liverpool lineup – this newfound ability to capitalize on chances created has been crucial to Liverpool’s rise from shot-happy Europa League entrant to title contenders.

Follow the money - and talent - back to MLS

In the August 27^th issue of Sports Illustrated, senior writer Grant Wahl compiled a team of American soccer players playing abroad. Such a mainstream publication – find any dentist in the States who doesn't subscribe – publishing a full-page “lightweight” feature on US soccer is relatively rare and Wahl takes the opportunity to pull the usual names from the regular hats. It's the basic, all-purpose US men's national team.

Assembling fictitious teams is a pleasant exercise in pointlessness. Almost every blogger and journalist has done so – they stimulate discussion, can be used to illustrate a point, attract pageviews like crazy and finally, much of the legwork (ie. research) is already completed meaning a quick turnaround. (Look here and here for some examples on Goal Posts).

For writers, they're our side of an enjoyable pub debate.

However, this team made for an interesting test-case. This is because many of the best US footballers – as with Canada, Australia and several other nations – play in Europe. The Americans, however, are a special breed as the quality of their local game is improving as its popularity increases. No longer does a player have to move to Europe to fulfill their footballing destiny or monetary desires, meaning that in the past half-decade the standard of MLS has taken a quantum leap.

MLS, while of inconsistent quality, can produce scintillating football and as the standard improves, so does local talent. Due to the Impact, Whitecaps and Toronto FC, Canadian football reaps some of the same benefits.

In fact, Major League Soccer has developed the quality of US football to a standard now where players earning a quid locally could quite easily compete with – and, if the conditions were right, perhaps defeat – a team made up of “exports”. This is a major signal that the league is prospering the sport both at a grass-roots and professional level.

While Wahl's team undoubtedly boasts more class than a team drawn solely from MLS, the gap in quality isn't as different as you'd initially expect. A team derived of American players who play only in MLS could be as potent as many European sides:

US MLS XI: (4-3-3) – Rimando (RSL), Beitashour (San Jose), Clark (Houston), O. Gonzalez (LA), Pearce (NY), O. Alonso (Seattle), Donovan (LA), Davis (Houston), E. Johnson (Seattle), Shea (Dallas), Wondolowski (San Jose).

courtesy: zimbio.com

While the team lacks je ne sais quoi, it would certainly be enough to trouble their overseas brethren. Eighteen years removed from the iconic 1994 World Cup – the event that begat Major League Soccer – the spot in general is seeing the results of hard work put in by the USSF/US Soccer.

Teams made up of local players in many of the “second-tier” big football countries such as Korea, Japan or Mexico would rival – if not defeat – their globe-trotting compatriots. These leagues, new and old, are deep enough to compete financially and competition-wise for the country's best players. The result is Keisuke Honda spearheading Japan's wonderful 2010 World Cup and Asian Cup campaigns or a major club like Arsenal signing Park Chu-Young.

The next step up in competition is when the league produces entire teams capable of contesting the CONCACAF Champions League and eventually, competing – if not beating – South American and European clubs at the World Club Championships.

Progress has been slow, but assured. Now the league is reaping the rewards.

Updated Goalkeeper stats available

After some happy-fun-time data entry, we can now present you with a fully updated list of European goalkeeper stats, including all players who started a game in the four major European leagues this season.  You can get there by clicking the link below.

European Goalkeeper stats, 2011-12 season

Balanced Sports also offers other collections of stats, like Key Man analysis and Invidivual/Team efficiency measures.  Feel free to take a look at them as well.

Don't judge a league by its elite

As football has become more and more corporate, the existence of elite cliques of teams in almost all the major four Europeans leagues have become an accepted part of the European football culture. While from time to time over the last fifteen years these subsections have been occasionally disrupted, it's not worth arguing against the balance of European football power being held by a maximum of four clubs in four leagues.

The same clubs almost always take part in the Champions League. While class is routinely (and tediously) said to be permanent, it would be more true to suggest that the established plutocracy is everlasting.

Considering well-earned prize money, league TV rights deals (especially pertinent in Spain), Champions' League income and large stadia, the wealthy club shave such a fiscal leg-up, that those clubs once (still?) associated with a European football superleague are essentially playing in a different league to their club opponents. This leads, especially in England, to clubs flush with imported players: in each of their last Champions' League matches, EPL clubs boasted a total of 12 players who had played with their club's juniors. Only four of those players – Ryan Giggs, Kieran Gibbs, Wojcieh Szczesny and Joe Hart – were starters.

Based on the past few seasons, the best clubs in the world have been Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and, if you tilt your head to the left and squint reeeal hard, Manchester United. However, these clubs seem to have birthrights allowing them access to European football and the money to buy players that most/all other teams in their respective countries envision only in their stickiest dreams. Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern and United now don't accurately represent their respective leagues but sit somewhere in the third standard deviation, part of a superelite that may as well play in a bloody superleague. (An idea that's never totally put to bed, by the way.)

Even though individual rights deals, league finances and priority on junior development makes this an exercise in apples and oranges, the strength of each league's mid-table sides must be evaluated to provide an accurate comparison. Perhaps now it's time to evaluate a league primarily by those squads in the middle of the pack, with both their achievement at home and abroad. Given the regular passage of players from mid-table teams to the elite, this also seems to best describe the league as a whole, rather than just paint a portrait of those paragon clubs.

Talk to a evangelising school principal and he will try to convince you that the best student in the class represents the quality of his teachers, amenities, tributary schools and leadership. However, this is often proved incorrect by assessing those students in the meaty part of the bell-curve. Money unlocks many doors, both in the education system and the football world. How students, teachers, clubs and players perform without that cash most accurately reveals the truth.

The most efficient teams in Europe

The following chart was inspired by a similar chart on the blog Experimental 3-6-1.  It displays the ratio between the average number of shots a team needs to score a goal, versus the average number shots they face before they concede.  Click the image to zoom in.

From the graph, we can surmise that Borussia Moenchengladbach has by far the sturdiest defence, while Freiburg offer about  as much resistance as wet paper.  The most inefficient teams in front of goal, however are Cesena and Kaiserslauten.  It's probably no surprise that both are in severe danger of relegation.

Scoring Stats - European Goalscoring Trends

When we first examined the most important marksmen in the Big Four leagues, we looked at which players in Europe were the most crucial to their teams. This was done according to Scoring Stats, a measure of a player's combined Goals and Assists, measured as a percentage of their team's total league goals for the season. Then, Serie A stars Marco Di Vaio and Edinson Cavani topped the European Scoring Stats tables, each contributing to over 63% of their club's goals.

Clubs in Italy and Germany - as well as the big two Spanish teams, Real Madrid and Barcelona - were much more likely to focus their offense around one player, as of the top twenty players by Percentage contribution to their team's goals, eight came from Italy and seven from Germany. In early April in Serie A, an average of 38.5% of all a team's goals came from that one focal player; in the Bundesliga it dropped to 36.77%. The English Premier League was by far least reliant on star men, their average contribution by a team leader (32.4%) propped up by Carlos Tevez's remarkable 50% contribution to Manchester City's cause.

Obviously this measure is highly swung in favour of forwards. Although some midfielders - such as Hoffenheim's Gylfi Sigurdsson - or defenders like Leighton Baines led their club, often that was the result of their free-kick taking duties (Baines recording sixteen total Scoring Stats, eleven of which were assists, either from crosses or set pieces).

English Premier League: A balanced attack triumphs

At the end of the Season, numbers didn't change much:

LEAGUE	Average Goals Per Team		Average Goals per Game		Avg %
Timeframe	April	Season End	April	Season End	April	Season End
Premiership	42.6	53.15	1.38	1.4	32.41	31.89
La Liga	40.4	52.1	1.35	1.37	35.38	37.33
Serie A	36.05	47.75	1.16	1.26	38.58	35.92
Bundesliga	40.17	49.67	1.43	1.46	36.77	35.01

Where Avg % is the average contribution to a team's total goals by the player with the most total goals + assists. Please note the Bundesliga is an eighteen team league (34 games), not a twenty-team league.

While most clubs decreased their reliance on their star men - in general - over the last six weeks of the season, only La Liga increased. This is in part due to the number of injuries suffered - these figures are always likely to be high at the start of a season and lower towards the end as more players get on the scoresheet and others either fall out rotations or receive injuries. England's total decreased as Carlos Tevez who, with only six weeks remaining in the season, had scored or delivered the assist for half of the Citizens' goals. His importance to league numbers is exemplified with the English percentage dropping by half a percent - because he missed just a month.

Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo: A cut above

Once again, European football was dominated by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. While Ronaldo managed to better his opponent's total, having fifty Scoring Stats in the league to Messi's forty-nine, his breakdown was typical of a centre-forward rather than the all-purpose forward into which he has morphed. He registered a 4:1 goals-to-assists ratio, while creative maestro Messi averaged slightly under three assists for every five goals. That he contributed 51.6% of Barca's stats is remarkable and due to their scoring 95 goals for the BBVA season; Ronaldo's Madrid scored 105 goals, meaning his percentage is slightly decreased (49.0%).

To remove those two (and replace them with "average" replacements) is telling:

LEAGUE	Average Goals Per Team		Average Goals per Game		Avg %
Timeframe	April	Season End	April	Season End	April	Season End
Premiership	42.6	53.15	1.38	1.4	32.41	31.89
La Liga	40.4	52.1	1.35	1.37	35.38	37.33
La Liga - 2	36.5	48.9	1.22	1.29	33.59	32.92
Serie A	36.05	47.75	1.16	1.26	38.58	35.92
Bundesliga	40.17	49.67	1.43	1.46	36.77	35.01

This can only be considered while keeping several factors in mind. Firstly, should Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi be injured, while the best players in the world, they would undoubtedly be replaced by someone above replacement level. (As a matter of interest "replacement level" is approximately twelve goals and four assists. The player with Scoring Stats most closely resembling those numbers is in-demand Espanyol striker Pablo Osvaldo). That is, this probably incorrectly assumes that Messi and Ronaldo are solely responsible for those goals, which may be true in part but definitely not 100% true. Secondly, it emphasises simply how great Cristiano Ronaldo was during the run-in as he chased Hugo Sanchez's Los Merengues scoring record.

You can, however, see how much Barcelona and Real Madrid inflate Spanish averages. Should they (heaven forbid) undergo financial meltdown, the tenor of the entire Spanish League will be changed forever.

In Part Two, we'll examine which players are the most crucial to their individual teams.

For full details, visit Balanced Sports' Scoring Stats page. There, you'll find totals for each team in Europe as well as for all four English divisions.