Where to Scout in Europe

This is an idea I’ve had for a while but have finally done some research into it and just want to talk about very briefly. I’ve been reading Jan Ríha’s Director of Football series and Stop bunching’s blog posts which made think about recruitment. The premise of the idea is to compare the quality of a national team to its domestic league if the national team is substantially better then that league, it may be producing good players that want to be moving to higher leagues.

I’ve toyed with a similar idea before with Peter McKeever, using ELO and pELO as well as average wages to see which leagues lower leagues should be signing. For example, League 1 and 2 teams have similar wages to top division Swedish and Norweigan teams but were lower quality, meaning that attracting the Scandinavian talent could be very effective.

To do this I got the UEFA rankings for national teams and each nations’ leagues. Here are the countries where the national team is better than the league.

For the scenario, imagine you are a Director of Football at a Championship club, you want to find value in the transfer market, you have several video analysts and data, and enough resources to cover a few countries outside of the top five.

So, I want to look at leagues which are significantly lower ranked than the national team, so I’m only going to consider countries with a difference bigger than 10.

This leaves nine nations. I’m excluding Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland as very few of their players play in their leagues. Only six of the recent Northern Irish side have played in the country’s league, and none of the Welsh squad have, with the country’s two biggest sides playing in the English system. Leaving six. I’m also choosing to exclude leagues below rank 40, which takes away just Montenegro with Wales and Northern Ireland already out.

This chart looks at where plays end up, categorising players in the current national teams. ‘Start abroad’ means that player never played in the country’s league and joined an academy in another country. ‘Left’ means that the player came through an academy, played in the domestic league before leaving to a bigger team. ‘Stayed’ means that they are still playing in the league.

You can see that a third of Bosnian players started or moved abroad at an early age. Only one Bosnian player still plays in the Bosnian league and that’s their uncapped third choice goalkeeper. None of the Icelandic or Slovakian teams still play in the domestic league.

Here you can see when players leave their homes leagues for bigger clubs. A lot were picked up before playing in the leagues. Not many are bought aged 17–18 and are mostly bought aged 21 or 22.

Overall, I believe that these five leagues are worth looking at to find a few hidden gems and good value in the market, and could be a good investment for clubs who want to be a stepping stone for players. Italian clubs have done this well in Bosnia and Slovakia, with German clubs investing in Switzerland and Poland too. But there is still potential value there. Ideally, I’d incorporate ELO or pELO as well as average wages in these leagues to look further into this area and make it specific to which level of club is the one recruiting.