Year after year, the CIES Football Observatory research team has developed a powerful approach for the technical analysis of player performance. On the basis of this methodology, issue number 171 of the Weekly Post presents the 10 best performing big-5 league players per position. Cristiano Ronaldo heads the table for forwards ahead of Lionel Messi.
To be eligible, a player must have been fielded for at least 900 domestic league minutes so far. Moreover, rankings make the distinction between full international players and footballers who did not yet play for a national A-team. The latter rankings allows us highlighting the top level performances of many players who are still relatively unknown.
The highest score overall was recorded for Real Madrid’s striker Cristiano Ronaldo: 94. This figure is one point higher than that measured for Barcelona’s Lionel Messi. In other positions, the best performing players so far have been Manuel Neuer and Stéphane Ruffier among goalkeepers, Mats Hummels among centre backs, Alex Sandro among full backs, Thiago Alcântara and Paul Pogba among central midfielders, as well as Kevin de Bruyne and Philippe Coutinho among attacking midfielders.
The highest score overall for non full internationals was observed for Marcos Alonso (Chelsea) and Jonathan Viera (Las Palmas): 87. The youngest footballers in the top 10 lists for players yet to be selected for national A-teams are Yann Karamoh (Caen), born in 1998, Allan Saint-Maximin (Bastia, on loan from Monaco) and Jesús Vallejo (Eintracht Frankfurt, on loan from Real Madrid), both born in 1997.
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