Wednesday 8 June 2016

Euro 2016 Interconnectivity Diagrams



Looking at the chart, 3 things really stand out for me.

1 - Liverpool and Juventus are the two club teams with the most players represented at the Euros (12 players each).  As a fan of the evil zebras, this gives me an odd sort of pride.  Given Liverpool didn't win anything, I find it interesting that so many Liverpool players are present.  Ditto Spurs (who are next with 11).  Manchester United at least won the FA Cup (10 players) and of the next three most represented teams (Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Fenerbahçe, with 9 each), Bayern and Barca won their respective leagues, although Fenerbahçe didn't.

So either national managers are going with their tried and tested, and to hell with recent form or there's a lot of non-Euro 2016 qualifying players playing for the national champions of England and Turkey.

2 - Wales*, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Iceland don't have any players playing in their own home league.  England are the only team where all their players play in their home league.  The days of 'play at home or else you'll not be on the team', are over, if they ever existed in football.

3 - What happened to Dutch football?

I don't just mean, "how do you go from World Cup semi-finalists to not even qualifying for Euros where 45% of the teams get to play in the finals?", I mean what's happened to Dutch football from top to bottom.

There are more players from the US and Qatari leagues than from the Dutch leagues.  There is precisely 1 player representing the Eredivisie (Arkadiusz Milik of Poland).

I think it's such a shock because it used to be that for the smaller (in football terms) countries, it would always be 'they've got no superstars, but they've got X who plays for PSV (or Ajax),' and that doesn't seem to happen any more.  (By the looks of it, Switzerland has taken over this role.)  I'm not sure why this has happened or if it's an actual shift or just a quirk for this Euros.

If you look at the community view:



it amuses me greatly that both Austria and Switzerland and the Czech Republic and Slovakia are joined in communities.  Poland and Hungary are joined because of the number of Hungarian players playing for Polish teams.  I presume England, Belgium and Spain are joined because of the number of Spanish and Belgian players playing in the Premier League.  Ireland and Northern Ireland are joined because they both have players playing for Blackburn Rovers and Derby County, who have no other players representing them and West Brom, who only have one other player representing them that doesn't play for one of the two Irelands.

*Yes, I know Wales have Swansea and Cardiff players playing for them but both of those teams play in English leagues.

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