The World Cup is the world's most prestigious soccer tournament. However, given that the tournament occurs once every four years, where should soccer fans go to watch the best soccer in the world on a regular basis? Which leagues are the most competitive in the world? In other words, where do most World Cup soccer players play professionally?
To answer this question, I analyzed the top leagues per country and tracked how many World Cup players played there professionally from the 1998 to 2022 World Cups. The data was collected per World Cup on Wikipedia.org. Using this data I find:
- The top five leagues contain 69% of all player appearances in the past seven editions of the World Cup
- England is ranked first
- France is ranked fifth
- Germany, Italy, and Spain are both between the English and French leagues (not much of a clear distinction between the three)
- These top five countries contain the majority player appearances made by players who play outside of their home country professionally
- The English system is so strong that if it were it's own country's top league, it would place 13th in the rankings of the top country's leagues
In addition to examining the country's top leagues, I also examined which clubs send the most players to the World Cup. The data comes from the past three World Cups (also from Wikipedia). I find:
- only eight clubs have sent more than ten players to the World Cup three times. They are shown here (in order of total appearances):
- The top five leagues is represented by these "super" clubs (those that have sent more than 10 players to two or more of the past three World Cups)
- Other than the English Premier League, there are only one or two super clubs in each of the top five leagues
The top clubs, and leagues for that matter, are highly concentrated -- very few clubs and leagues produce the majority of players. While this may not be surprising to most soccer fans, what's interesting about my analysis is the numeric evidence for identifying the top five leagues. It's easy to say that the French Ligue 1 and Spanish La Liga leagues are some of the best in the world, but which one is better? By how much? With my analysis here, we have hard numbers to make the case that the Spanish league is better.
To read more about my findings I have written a blog documenting my findings.