A Digital Atlas to celebrate the Football Observatory’s 10th birthday

In a few days, the CIES Football Observatory will embark on its tenth year of existence. We are delighted to celebrate our birthday with you with the launch of our Digital Atlas on European football.

This tool is freely available online from our website. It enables anyone to analyse the state of the game in 31 European countries and to follow its progress from year to year. The indicators offered study the characteristics of players from over 500 first division clubs from the perspective of age, height, mobility, training, origin, etc.

By consulting the Atlas, you can notably learn that there is almost 10cm of difference between the club with the tallest players, Diósgyör (186.3cm on average), and that with the shortest ones, Barcelona (177.3).

The Atlas also allows for comparisons between leagues. Regarding age, for example, it shows that the Italian Serie A regroups the oldest footballers (27.3 years on average), while the Dutch Erdivisie is made up of the youngest ones (24.2).

Issue number 92 of the Big-5 Weekly Post helps situate the five major championships in the European context from the point of view of the average age of squad members. It also presents the average age for the 98 big-5 league clubs. The Post notably shows that more than 5 years separate the youngest club, Valencia, from that which gathers the oldest players, Atalanta.

From January onwards, the Football observatory’s academic team will also offer monthly reports instead of our annual paying publications. Like our Digital Atlas, these will also be freely accessible from our website. The first issue will cover the topic of club instability. Moreover, we shall continue the publication of the Big-5 Weekly Post. We are open to sponsorship proposals.

In autumn 2015, we also plan to publish a book destined for the general reader summarising the key points garnered from our analyses over the past decade. There are indeed over 20,000 football enthusiasts like yourselves now on our mailing list. We warmly thank your for your interest in all our numerous areas of initiative.

Happy Christmas and best wishes for 2015!