I’ve created this blog with one aim. That is to answer the
question “who is the most successful player to have ever played in the top 5
European leagues?” For the uninitiated, that’s the top flights in England (both
the Premier League and it’s previous incarnation, Football League Division 1),
Spain, Italy, Germany and France.
A lot of these lists are based upon opinion and/or a lot of
unmeasurable qualities such as flair, iconic status, cultural impact or even popularity.
These are all undoubtedly qualities a lot of great players possess but also
almost impossible to quantify.
Other lists attempt to provide a degree of measurement by
looking at goals scored, assists made, or trophies won. However, these all have
various biases towards either attacking players or those players lucky enough
to play for the biggest and most successful clubs and can exclude other great
defensive players or stalwarts at smaller teams.
Finally, more modern statistical measurement in football
enables us to track more useful metrics for each player such as pass success,
tackles made, key contributions etc. This is all great stuff for measuring the
true impact of each player but has the drawback that it has only started to be
tracked relatively recently and it’s impossible to say how many successful
dribbles a player such as George Best had across his career.
So, now we get to the unique nature of this blog. I have
attempted to prove statistically who the greatest players are based upon a set
of simple stats contained within my European football database. These include league
appearances and team performance. The calculation has been designed to be
relatively easy to follow and full details can be found here.
The output of these calculations yields a metric for each
player which I have termed Performance Points. These have been
calculated for each player for each season in their career and then totalled up
to give an overall career score. The player with the most performance points is
the player who I have determined to be the greatest ever player in the top 5
leagues.
Essentially, the metric has been set up to reward a player
who has displayed the following attributes:
- Regularly contributed to a team’s season – the more
matches played, the higher the score
- Featured as part of a number of successful teams
– the metric rewards all teams but is weighted towards teams with the most
successful seasons
- Awards longevity – the longer your career the more
points a player scores
Finally, I’m not purporting that this is a definitive statistic
but is one of a few ways to measure how great a player is/was? I feel that is
does equally allow comparison between players across positions and also enables
us to compare a player from 1888 to one in 2024. Mostly, I hope that this
provides food for thought and creates further discussions.
I’ll be counting down from 500 to 1 over the
next few months by sharing a list of players every few days. I will also be
sharing other statistical titbits as we go along. Thanks to my friend Robin Broster
for adding a bit of colour by writing profiles for each player.
