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News

Tue. 18 March 2014

Big-5 Weekly Post n°67: exclusive data from the 2014 World Cup Preview

The 67th edition of the Big-5 Weekly Post reveals exclusive data taken from the 2014 World Cup Preview published today by the CIES Football Observatory. This new publication analyses the profile of players used by each national team during the qualification process for the competition. For Brazil, we took into account footballers employed both in friendly matches played during the qualification phase and the Confederations Cup.

The employer club whose footballers played the most minutes of World Cup qualification matches is Real Madrid, followed by six other big-5 league clubs: Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City. The highest ranked club not participating in the big-5 leagues is Zenit St-Petersburg (8th), while the first non-European team is Esteghlal FC of Iran, in 14th place.

Big-5 league teams represent two thirds of the 30 top ranked clubs. In total, 48.9% of minutes played were by footballers under contract with top division teams in England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France. This finding reflects the high concentration of national A-team players in the most competitive European championships.

All national teams qualified fielded players employed by big-5 league clubs. However, the percentage of minutes played by big-5 league footballers was below 25% for Australia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Iran, South Korea and Russia. These nations will most probably struggle to qualify for the knockout stages.

We hope that you will enjoy the new statistics presented in our 2014 World Cup Preview and we stay at your disposal for more analysis at [email protected].

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