Where do the best technical football players in the world come from? Analysing the association between technical proficiency and geographical origin in elite football

Abstract

Opta seasonal sum total statistics for 1,533 professional football players representing 88 nations around the world were analysed in order to determine where the most proficient technical football players originate from. A series of Kruskal-Wallis tests were conducted and results revealed that South American players were significantly better at scoring the first goal (p = .044), scoring penalties (p = .034) and attempting shots (p = .018) than their European counterparts. Both European and South American players were revealed to be more adept at passing actions than their African, Asian or North American counterparts. Both South American and African players committed significantly more errors than their European, Asian or North American counterparts, with South American players more frequently apprehended by the referee than Asian players (p = .031), European players (p = .020) and North American players (p = .034). African players were revealed to be caught offside (p = .039) as well as have more unsuccessful ball touches (p = .001) and be dispossessed (p = .036) significantly more often than European players. It is concluded that a player's geographical origin can impact their technical proficiency in football and this theme needs further investigation.

An investigation identifying which key performance indicators influence the chances of promotion to the elite leagues in professional European football

“…However, in a similar manner to what "talent" actually comprises of being subjective and contentious, traditional TI systems can also be informed primarily by the subjective opinions of coaches and scouts rather than scientific evidence (Larkin & Reeves, 2018). Thus, the second strand of research in this field revolves around the use of a variety of statistical techniques intended towards the identification of both physical and technical parameters that can influence the team and player performances (Andrzejewski et al, 2013;Bush et al, 2015;Fernandez-Navarro et al, 2016;Jamil, 2020;Liu, Gomez et al, 2015;Di Salvo et al, 2009;Zhou et al, 2018). With regard to the second strand of research, many of these studies have tended in the main to focus on football at the elite level in the form of national and international knockout football tournaments or the top tier of professional football in the country adopted as the focus of the study.…”