Magnificent Mahrez?

Central to Leicester City's rise from almost-certain relegation in the 2014/15 Premier League season, to almost-certain title winners in the 2015/16 Premier League season, has been Riyad Mahrez. Not only is that a shocking sentence to have composed, it's also shocking just how much impact Mahrez has actually had. With 16 goals and 11 assists in the league this season, he has been a revelation.

And just to continue with that 'shocking' theme, he was plucked from the relative obscurity of Le Havre in France's Ligue 2 for a mere £400,000. For that amount, you could probably buy Cristiano Ronaldo's big toe. I extracted some data from www.whoscored.com (sadly not about Ronaldo's toe), to see just how his contribution measured up to some of Europe's leading lights in the Attacking Midfield positions.

For this visualisation I've only looked at Assists and Goals, because there's a whole myriad of different ways to measure, I didn't want to get too bogged down in that just yet, despite how interesting it may be. One pick that I didn't bring through was that of the 32 players I selected, Mahrez ranks 26th for average passes per game. So despite seeing less of the ball than his contemporaries, he seems to do an awful lot more with it.

But I digress, and to the viz - I'll let you judge for yourself who it reflects well and badly upon...

Can Money Buy You Love in the Top 5 Leagues in Europe?

First and foremost, welcome to 2016 - I hope you all have a prosperous, fun and exciting new year! 2015 was a great year for me, escaping an employer that was seemingly content to stop investing in staff development, into a new role with a new employer where the entire culture is focused on development. A refreshing change, but enough about me - let's talk data.

The data for this post comes from the Football Observatory in Switzerland, and the idea came about after I saw them featured in the Independant, looking at the top 100 valuable players in Europe. I delved around on their site and found data that had tracked the transfer fees spent on current squads for all teams in the top 5 leagues in Europe.

Naturally I wondered how those transfer fees had translated into points and league positions. The results of that curiosity can be found in the storyboard visualisation below. A couple of great finds came out of it:

1. Obviously Leicester are tearing up trees in the Premier League, but across the Channel, Angers and Caen are moving mountains on their shoestring budgets. So small has their transfer outlay been, the Football Observatory rounded it up to 'Less than 5 million Euros'. So the actual numbers are probably less than displayed.
2. Also Chelsea have been at the centre of attention for failing so miserably this season, but don't let that detract from Newcastle, Sunderland and Aston Villa. Their poor seasons have not gone unnoticed but perhaps the cost of their squads has at £123m, £102m and £98m they are ranked 19th, 25th and 26th in Europe respectively on that score. Pretty shocking!