UEFA UCL All Time Preformances

UEFA Champions League Data

The dataset covers teams in the UEFA Champions League, often considered the greatest annual sports event in the world. The event is a soccer competition where the best of Europe come together to compete. The different columns represent top 100 teams in each respective area, some teams have NA values as they are top 100 in a field but not top 100 in another. This can be helpful as some teams with very few games played will be filtered out as they may be outliers. These teams who have played in something like 1 champions league campaign should not be accounted for given the specific things this document will look for.

This data is scraped from pages off of https://www.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/history/rankings/. I looped through the pages: appearances, matches_played, matches_won, matches_drawn, matches_lost, goals_scored, goals_conceded and scraped all data from these pages, which as limited to the 100 rows. The data is outputted and can be downloaded from https://myxavier-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/klayers_xavier_edu/IQBO-XvBE_dFTZzvRsNg-DW3AWk3k5rmxhKXmx99tmOijno?download=1.

Made note of the top 5 leagues in some the document, these leagues are in the countries:
ESP (Spain), ENG (England), GER (Germany), ITA (Italy), FRA (France)

The following data will cover some areas of interest to show what overall performances of different teams.

Analysis:

How do the top leagues and clubs preform overall in the Champions League?

Although certain countries have more Champions League bids than others, I wanted to see which teams sent the most unique teams. The better the UEFA ranking of a league, the more bids that country gets. This will show not only the best leagues, but also the most competitive leagues with different teams being able to qualify for these bids in different years.

Unsurprisingly, England has the most, as does France, and the “top 5 leagues” are truly in the top 5. This is both caused by these countries having the strongest leagues gaining the most bids, and the leagues being competitive enough to see more unique teams overtime. It shows that the leagues commonly considered the top 5 are truly the most competitive.

Titles won is the best way to see the most dominant UCL team, however, point per match is a good measure to view how teams preform in their average match. In a league phase in soccer, a win is 3 points whereas a draw is 1. I used the metric in the data to consider overall game strength, even though they don’t use this measure in the Champions League.

The team with the most titles, Real Madrid, is only second, showing they are dominant but just don’t win as many matches as much as the first place team. AC Milan, the team with the second most titles isn’t even on here. This may show that they have had some dominant years, but overall lose a lot of games in the years they don’t win the title. They may have won many titles, but ultimately shouldn’t be considered a top team. This graph also supports the claim that the top league in the Champions League is England, with Spain also doing really well.

Given the idea of points per match, I wanted to compare the top leagues to see if they truly have the strongest teams on average. I filtered the top 7 countries with highest average points per match by team to see if the leagues truly had strong teams or just 1 good team that was an outlier, falsely making the country look strong.

This fortifies the idea behind England being the strongest league and gaining the most bids each season. Their teams preform the best on average along with the top 5 leagues also having their status fortified. Serbia being included really is surprising and shows that they are a historically top league. They may have very few bids but the strength of their teams may be underrated. This shows other non top leagues can preform with the the best of the best.

With a dataset of points per match already existing, I wanted to see if this has a direct correlation with goals per match. Obviously goals would help win and gain points, but if a team concedes a lot, they likely won’t win a game. This can help to give a basic idea if offense if more important than defense.

Comparing these entries, there are some repeating values, however; considering points are more important than goals, it seems defense does play a part in these matches. Some teams who have the most points per match are not quite top for goals scored. With that being said, the top 7 teams in points per match do have the most goals scored. I think this shows that offense is most definitely the largest factor in winning games and dominating the competition. With outside knowledge, the top 7 teams (with the exception of Man Utd) are also the strongest current teams who keep being the favorites to win the competition over the years.

Considering the data was only collected for top 100 teams in each category, I wanted to see how these teams preform in terms of goals. I filtered only teams with available data for each goals scored and conceded and included them on a simple scatter plot. This not only shows the distribution but also teams who have had an all time negative goal differential. Negative goal diff is shown by teams falling below the red line.

Surprisingly, for the top teams in goals scored, a decent amount fall into the category of negative goal differential. I would have assumed most of these teams would be above the line as they might play weaker teams at the start of some seasons and can likely increase their goal difference. This instead shows that even though teams show up in the Champions League often, they might still struggle.

Final Conclusion

With the shown data, I believe the claim that England being the strongest league is true. They preform the best in the Champions League in all aspects. I also think that this information fortifies the idea that the historic top 5 teams do include: England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France. All these countries were consistently the strongest in offensive, points and unique teams in the Champions League.

In terms of important factors, I believe offense is the most important aspect of this competition. It has a very similar result as the points per game, and the teams with the top offense are currently the strongest teams in the world. There are no teams that have scored over 300 goals and fall under the line of goal scored = goals conceded. This goes to show that no matter how many you concede, it is important to increase the number you score rather than decrease the number you concede, meaning better offense is more important than better defense.