Welcome To The Footie 500 (FTE500)

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.