Adding the league context into player scouting – recruitment analysis

Context is everything when we discuss player recruitment, right?

The above sentence is how I started my article for the site last week as I looked at ways in which we can assess individual teams within the context of their league when targetting areas to scout and recruit from.

Context is incredibly important but it can be applied at different levels to the recruitment process. In the article last week, which you can find here, I drilled down into league data using percentile rankings to find clubs in Austria and Czechia who have a similar style of play to Leeds United before finding players at those clubs who could potentially be recruitment targets.

It is entirely possible, however, that I skipped the first step in terms of identifying the leagues and the markets that you should target to recruit from. In this article, I will again use league-wide data across certain key metrics in order to find which leagues these metrics are most prominent in. This is a process that I would implement at the start of any recruitment process when you are sitting down and putting in place your player profiles and deciding which metrics are most important in each positional profile.

Using data and league rankings at that point allows you to start to build a position-specific framework that lets you target your scouting processes in the areas that make the most sense.

Why is this important though? Well, for a small set of clubs (the elite of the elite) none of this matters because their reach in terms of scouting and recruitment is so extensive. For everyone else though there is definite value in targetting your approach in terms of recruitment, at least for the first stage of the recruitment cycle. This is also an important consideration in the modern game for teams who are looking to loan out young players to gain first-team exposure. Understanding the type of leagues that you are potentially sending these players to is an important step in the process.

But how does this work?

Well, to begin with, we have to build our data set. For the purpose of this article, I have created a dataset with leagues across Europe in areas that are split across three key areas. Defensive, passing and ball progression, attacking and squad composition. I have run the data set through a code to turn the data into percentile data to give a better sense of the variation between the leagues. Now, we can start to assess the data properly, starting with the defensive phase of the game.

Using simple rankings we can immediately start to build a picture of where leagues feature compared to competitors across the defensive spectrum. To the left we have defensive duels per 90 where the Swiss Super League come out as the most active and League One in England is the least active. In the centre, we have aerial duels per 90 where Englands League Two is the most prominent with Ligue 1 in France averaging the fewest aeriel duels per 90. Lastly, we have passes per defensive action (PPDA) which we use to assess how often teams press the ball in each league, for this ranking I have inverted the percentile ranking so that the leagues with the highest value are the most aggressive in terms of their press, interestingly the Czech league comes out on top as the most aggressive league in our data set while the French top-flight is again bottom of our ranking.

From this point, you can start to build insights that will inform and help your recruitment process. If I were, for example, looking to recruit a central defender for an SPFL club then I might start with their ability in the air. The SPFL is ranked fourth in terms of aerial duels per 90 so immediately I know that any central defender we sign will have to be strong in the air. If you look at the central ranking you can see that the SPFL is sandwiched between the Czech Fortuna Liga and the 2.Bundesliga in Germany. We would know that central defenders in these markets are capable in the air and a fit for the SPFL but what about across our other rankings? Well, for defensive duels the SPFL actually falls down the list significantly while the 2.Bundesliga falls lower still. The Czech Fortuna Liga, however, is a good bit higher. Now, lets look at PPDA and pressure and we can see that the league in Czechia is significantly higher than the SPFL.

St