15.2 Which leagues do international players play in?

Four of the biggest European leagues are those of England, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Figure 15.5 shows how many players there were from those leagues in the EUROs from 1992 on. Until 2008 the numbers were fairly equal. Since then the English league has become much more important and numbers from Spain have remained static.

Figure 15.3: Numbers of players from four major leagues

The 2020 competition was delayed until 2021 because of the Covid pandemic. Abel (2021) constructed a website of all the players who ever took part and drew chord diagrams to show the relationships between the nationalities of the players and the countries they played in at club level. Here barcharts are drawn to display the data for Euro 2020.

Figure 15.4: Numbers of Euro 2020 players playing in the different European leagues

Bars have mostly been coloured by the main shirt colour of that country. Several teams use white, so England has been given light blue, Germany black, and Russia red. Countries whose leagues provided less than 5 players have been grouped together into a final ‘Other’ category, including five nations who took part in the competition. Of the 622 players, just under a quarter, 152, played in England.

A few players played in leagues outside of Europe. For those playing in Europe, Figure 15.5 shows the numbers playing in the different national leagues, including Turkey and Russia in Europe, and combining the numbers for the English and Scottish leagues.

Figure 15.5: Numbers of Euro 2020 players playing in various European national leagues

To show which players play where, barcharts are drawn, one for the national team of each participating country. Figure 15.6 shows the chart for Finland. The individual bars show where Finland’s players play their club football. The bars have been ordered by the total number of players from that league playing in Euro 2020. Countries with less than 9 players in the competition have been grouped into “Other”. The first bar represents the number of Finnish players currently playing in England.

Figure 15.6: Numbers of Finland’s Euro 2020 players playing in various countries’ leagues

Figure 15.7: Numbers of Euro 2020 players of each team playing in various countries’ leagues

Figure 15.7 has 24 barcharts, one for each competing team. The team charts have been ordered by the percentage of players playing in their own national league, so the chart for England comes first, as most of the English squad were playing in England. Every country’s team includes players from at least three different countries. For some of the big teams (England, Italy, Russia), almost all the players come from their own league. Germany’s team includes several players playing in England and a few elsewhere. Spain has as many players playing in England as in Spain. France has about the same number of players playing in England, Germany, Spain, and France itself. Most of the other countries have players playing in many leagues, the exceptions being Ukraine, where most play there, Austria whose team play mostly in Germany, Wales whose players play in the English league (even though a few of the teams are based in Wales), and Scotland whose players almost all play in England or Scotland. Finland boasted the most distributed players. Their squad of 26 played in 16 different national leagues. Curiously, the country that had no team at the Euros but the most club players taking part was Cyprus with 8 (3 playing for North Macedonia, 2 for Finland, 2 for Slovakia, and 1 for Hungary). Only Russia of the 24 competing countries had no players playing in England.