February 27 – Chelsea’s Eden Hazard is the world’s leading dribbler of the ball so far this season, topping Neymar and Lionel Messi in an analysis of Europe’s Big 5 league players.
February 16 – Research by the CIES Football Observatory into the age ranges within clubs in 31 top division European leagues finds that the most competitive clubs are the ones with older squads.
February 6 – The three biggest transfers in the winter window - Philippe Coutinho (€160m), Virgil van Dijk (€84m) and Diego Costa (€66m) – were all concluded at a higher value than the real worth of the players, according to analysis by the CIES Football Observatory. Liverpool overpaid by €21 million for van Dijk, but balanced that with Barca’s overpayment of €13 million for Coutinho. Chelsea managed to get an impressive €26 million more than CIES’s estimated real value for Costa.
January 31 – Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and for Manchester City it is the route to winning titles. The club top a European table of clubs across 31 leagues ranked by the most accurate passes per domestic league game since the start of the season.
January 19 – With the Winter transfer window open but the market relatively cold in comparison to the last overheated Summer transfer window bonanza, the CIES Football Observatory has produced an analysis of the destinations of the players from the three main exporting countries of Brazil, Argentina and France.
December 19 – Barcelona players are more likely to be key players for their countries than those at Manchester United, Spurs, Bayern Munich or Juventus. A survey of minutes played by national A team players in 2017 saw Barca players rack up 139 matches and 10, 846 minutes.
December 6 – French prodigy Kylian Mbappé tops the ranking by transfer value of U21 players in the big-5 European leagues. The PSG striker takes over the lead spot from Spurs’ Dele Alli.
November 21 – England may have had double World Cup success at FIFA U17 and U20 levels but the fears that few of these winning players would be given limited first team opportunity in the Premier League has very quickly become a reality.
November 7 – Manchester City and Spurs have the most valuable squads in Europe, according to research by the CIES Football Observatory. Barca come third in the ranking with Chelsea in fourth spot. All of their squads are valued at over €1 billion.
September 26 – Possession stats have become a staple of the TV presentation package and an indication of how games are progressing – generally winning teams have the majority of possession. Celtic top a ranking of European clubs this season, with a thumping 70.8% of ball possession.
September 21 – A ranking of top division clubs in 31 European nations according to the average age of line-ups fielded since the start of the current season shows just 15 clubs from the Big 5 leagues in the top 100 and none from the Premier League.
May 16 – The CIES Football Observatory has ranked the best players of the 2016/17 season using their stats analysis and have come up with a Best XI that includes five players from the Bundesliga wth four of them – Manuel Neuer, Javi Martinez, Mats Hummels and Thiago Alcantara – from Bayern Munich.
May 11 – Brazil is still the country that provides most players to clubs worldwide with 1,202 Brazilians plying their trade outside of Brazil. France has the second highest number of players overseas with 781 (107 of them in England) and Argentina is the third highest with 753.
April 11 – The issue of competitive balance in European competition was brought into political focus recently with UEFA’s new Champions League qualification criteria which sees four teams from the top four nations automatically qualify for the group stages. Not only does this reduce the opportunity of other teams from smaller leagues to challenge but it will likely concentrate more of the revenue towards the biggest teams.
February 21 – Of the 16 teams left in the knockout rounds the Champions League, 86 of the 384 players registered (16 squads of 24 players) graduated to the first team via the academy of that club. However, 26 of those players were playing for different clubs than those that trained them.