June 18 – The CIES Football Observatory has published an analysis of club and national contributions to 2014 World Cup players’ development. The ranking system illuminates which clubs have done the most in creating the talent on show in Brazil.
The data provided accounts club-trained players, meaning any player that has trained at a club for three years between the ages of 15-21 as per UEFA definition, along with the amount of minutes played by the footballer at each club. This is done to ascertain the qualitative weight of each clubs’ role in the player’s progress.
Feyenoord Rotterdam came out on top of the table, having nine club-trained players in attendance, whom together accumulated 882 matches for the first team before turning 23. Barcelona, and Deportivo Saprissa, also provided nine club-trained players to the tournament, but these players had less matches under their belt by the time they turned 23 and so are left trailing in 2nd and 7th place respectively.
Lille OSC are the top ranked French team, lying in 5th position, Manchester United FC are the top ranked English club, coming in at 6th, FC Bayern Munchen are the top ranked German club, in 10th place, and Udinese Calcio are the highest Italian team in the charts, settling for 25th.
The ranking by league chart documents the French association as having the highest representation, with 56 club-trained players making 6,255 appearances before the age of 23. England came in second with Germany third.
The report suggests that the French association’s dominance is “due to the high number of footballers trained in France playing for other national A-teams, notably Africans. This finding also reflects the high employment rate of U23 players in French clubs.”
Full link here: http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/pdf/wcs2014_development_en.pdf
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