A proof-of-concept R package to help you find:
- past and present team mates of named footballers
- a single team mate shared by multiple players at some point
Read more in the accompanying blog post.
This package is dependent on the excellent {worldfootballR} package by Jason Zivkovic, which helps fetch player data from Transfermarkt.
[Insert gif of Kieran Dyer and Lee Bowyer fighting as Newcastle team mates]
You can install the package from GitHub. It uses the base R pipe (|>)
internally, so you’ll need R >=v4.1.
remotes::install_github("matt-dray/soccercolleagues")
library(soccercolleagues)Example: fetch all players from all seasons of the English Premier League. This will take several minutes.
epl_players <- get_players(
seasons = 1992:2020,
country = "England"
)
sample_n(epl_players, 5) |>
select(player_name, team_name, season)## # A tibble: 5 × 3
## player_name team_name season
## <chr> <chr> <chr>
## 1 Rob Lee newcastle-united 1998
## 2 Gordon Durie tottenham-hotspur 1992
## 3 Cheikhou Kouyaté west-ham-united 2017
## 4 Daniel James swansea-city 2016
## 5 Julian Watts sheffield-wednesday 1995
From this, you can isolate all the team mates for a given player, or all the common team mates for several named players for the teams and season in which they played together.
get_colleagues(
epl_players,
c("Gary Neville", "Phil Neville")
) |>
glimpse()## Rows: 880
## Columns: 12
## $ focus_name <chr> "Gary Neville", "Gary Neville", "Gary Neville", "Gary Neville", …
## $ player_name <chr> "Kevin Pilkington", "Gary Walsh", "Peter Schmeichel", "Colin Mur…
## $ player_pos <chr> "Goalkeeper", "Goalkeeper", "Goalkeeper", "Centre-Back", "Right-…
## $ player_age <dbl> 18, 24, 28, 16, 28, 26, 31, 27, 18, 24, 18, 23, 17, 17, 17, 17, …
## $ nationality <chr> "England", "England", "Denmark", "Northern Ireland", "England", …
## $ in_squad <dbl> 1, 16, 46, 0, 36, 46, 47, 48, 0, 45, 45, 40, 3, 0, 1, 2, 30, 10,…
## $ appearances <dbl> 0, 1, 46, 0, 35, 45, 47, 47, 0, 45, 45, 30, 1, 0, 0, 1, 29, 7, 2…
## $ goals <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 5, 5, 1, 0, 6, 11, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 9, 9, 15,…
## $ minutes_played <dbl> 0, 90, 4170, 0, 3102, 3932, 4229, 4260, 0, 3890, 3871, 1546, 25,…
## $ team_url <chr> "https://www.transfermarkt.com/manchester-united/startseite/vere…
## $ team_name <chr> "manchester-united", "manchester-united", "manchester-united", "…
## $ season <chr> "1992", "1992", "1992", "1992", "1992", "1992", "1992", "1992", …
Sample from all the current and former team mates of a named player or players. Sampling is weighted by total playing time, so well-known players are more likely to arise.
sample_colleagues(
all_players = epl_players,
players = c(
"Shay Given",
"Dwight Yorke",
"El-Hadji Diouf",
"Matthew Upson",
"Leighton Baines"
)
)## [1] "Emile Heskey"
This is especially satisfying if they only have one player in common.
In the spirit of the ‘pub quiz’ nature of this, there’s also an
extremely proof-of-concept Shiny app available with
open_colleagues_quiz(). You’ll need to install {shiny} and {shinyjs}
from CRAN before you use it.