The Leagues to Watch to Cure Your World Cup Hangover
Identifying the top Soccer Leagues in the world according to the number of players sent to the World Cup
“I only really watch soccer during the World Cup. I really liked watching it this year but I don’t know where to watch soccer now that the World Cup is over…”. Millions of casual soccer fans are thinking this exact thought right now. And who can blame them? After such an unpredictable, emotional and talented World Cup, it’s only natural to want to get more into the sport.
To guide these casual fans to the light, I analyzed the number of players sent from each country’s top flight league to see which leagues are the strongest in the world. I did this by analyzing the professional leagues that World Cup players participate in. After looking at the data, five leagues are clear winners. Further, there are clear frontrunners in each of the five leagues. Not only can you know which league to watch, but also which team to watch in order to see the highest quality soccer in the world. Unsurprisingly, the five leagues are generally agreed to be the best in the world. Within those five leagues, eight teams stand head and shoulders above the rest.
The leagues I am identifying are certainly not unknown to most fans. What will interest them is the numbers associated to each league. Many consider the English Premier League to be the best league in the world. But how much better is it than, say, the German Bundesliga? With my data, I rank the top five teams and compare this to other proposed rankings of these teams. Even with different criteria, the rankings are nearly identical. Without further ado, let’s see which leagues we’re watching after this World Cup!
The data for this project comes from the Wikipedia tables detailing the World Cup Squads for the 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022 World Cups. The seven datasets help highlight the powerhouse leagues of soccer and are relatively unskewed by outliers. The information given in the dataset is as follows:
- A country’s league (for convenience, simply ‘league’ in this article): the highest league system based in this country (the Vancouver Whitecaps FC, for example, will fall under the United States’ league because the US Soccer league is based in New York, USA)
- number of players sent to the World Cup in total (this can also be thought of as the “player appearances” because if the same player goes to two World Cups and played in the same league in both, he will be counted twice. The same goes for the following two metrics.)
- how many foreign players plat in the host country’s league and
- how many players play in the lower tiers of that country’s league and still play in the World Cup (note: the data only covers the 2018 and 2022 editions of the World Cup).
Of the metrics mentioned, the total number of players seems to be the most important. Here are the top leagues:
Many of the World Cup players come from the top 5 countries — 69% in fact. As you will see, this will be a theme in all parts of my analysis: England, Germany, Italy, Spain, and France (not necessarily in that order, more on that later) are all at the top of the charts for every metric.
Further, we can learn a lot by comparing the number of players sent and the number of players playing in a different national squad than the one of the host league. Turkey has a relatively strong league despite the fact that Turkey has not participated in a World Cup since 1954 (and even then it was because of a coin toss). On the other hand, Costa Rica has sent 37 domestic players and zero foreign players.
Similarly, players will play outside of their home country in order to compete in these top flight leagues. Here are the top 10 in my dataset:
The top five leagues utterly dominate in this department. In fact, four times as many players play outside their national squad in the top five leagues as the rest of the leagues combined! Clearly these leagues are the main destinations for aspiring world-class soccer players around the world.
Additionally, even the lower tier leagues (chiefly the English Football League One) are desirable for World Cup Players for the top five countries.
In short, England’s second tier league could be considered more desirable than many other countries’ top leagues! It would be placed 13th in the world, just between Turkey and Belgium. This is a major reason that the English professional football system must be considered the best in the world.
Rankings are always a part of the sports landscape. No matter where you look there are lists comparing players, teams, stadiums, etc. Using the data that I have here, I’ll attempt to rank the leagues in terms of two metrics: the total number of players sent and the number of foreign World Cup players playing in that league system. To do this, I assign a ranking to each country for each of the two categories and then add up those values. The league with the lowest number will receive the top spot. The top ten are as follows:
Unsurprisingly, England, Germany, Italy, Spain and France are at the top of this list. After all, six of the past seven World Cup trophies have gone to one of these nations’ teams (Brazil and Argentina are the only other countries to win since the 1998 tournament). Despite the rankings given here, there’s a virtual tie for the second spot in the list between Germany, Italy, and Spain — the values in both metrics are very similar. Thus, the rankings would be as follows:
- England
- Germany/Italy/Spain
- France
These rankings are not very different from the received wisdom on the subject. Three websites have the following rankings for the top five leagues in the World:
- Football League Rankings: England, Germany, Spain, Italy, France
- Soccer Prime: England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France
- Sportsbrief: England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France
These rankings are nearly identical to what we see in my analysis: the first and fifth positions are clear while the middle ones are not at all. This is the case even when considering multiple different criteria to make each ranking. From my analysis, and that of others, the top five leagues have a clear hierarchy.
Clubs are another fascinating part of the picture: which clubs are most represented in the World Cup? Using data from the 2014, 2018 and 2022 World Cups we can see which clubs regularly send nearly their entire team to the World Cup (at least 10 players). From this data we see that there are an elite, world-(cup)-class group of eight that dominate the rankings:
Many hard-core soccer fans will nod and smile looking at a table like this. These teams have sent a full starting lineup (and sometimes more than that!) to each of the past three World Cups. Of these, three are in England, two are in Spain, and one each are from Italy, France, and Germany. Honorable mentions go to the only two teams to complete this feat twice: Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal. Unsurprisingly, both teams are from England.
One will notice that these teams are not concentrated in a single league: Italy, France and Germany are more of less dominated by a single team (Paris Saint-Germain, for example, has 19% of all Ligue 1 players in the World Cup, 3.9 times more than expected if all players were evenly distributed). For this reason there was a controversial proposal to create a top flight, pan-European league called the European Super League (not to be confused with the tournament style UEFA Champions League). It would have been composed of 20 teams, twelve of which were founding clubs. Each one of those twelve clubs are represented in the ten clubs mentioned here.
There are, of course, other ways we can assess players, team, and club quality using this World Cup as a comparison. We could measure the number of minutes played by each of these players in the World Cup. After all, someone who never touches the field is counted just as much as a superstar in this analysis. On the flip side of the coin, we could look at the quality of the players within a club. A bench player in the English Premier League may be a superstar for their country’s team. Lastly, clubs play each other regularly. We could examine the highest performance of these clubs to rank their quality. There’s no shortage of tournaments to look at in this regard.
My analysis could be a starting off point for any of these more detailed analyses. The same picture, however, will likely emerge. These European leagues have some of the longest football traditions in the world and constantly learn from each other and advance the game. I have no doubt in my mind that they are the best around.
Soccer is a fascinating game that captivates the entire world. With its current peak in popularity it’s important to keep the casual fan engaged. By looking at where the World Cup players play professionally I show which countries have leagues that are as close to the World Cup tournament as one could possible get.
The European leagues are far and away the best in the world. The clear top five are: England, Italy, Spain, Germany, and France. Of these, England is clearly the best of the five and France the weakest. These teams have dozens of players appear in every World Cup who don’t even represent that league’s home country. These leagues truly are international powerhouses because of the talent they attract. Further, there are eight clubs that are dominant in these leagues. Nearly every starting player in these clubs is also playing (and likely starting) for their home country.
With the World Cup coming to a close, why not turn the TV to one of these top leagues and watch world class soccer all year ‘round? Happy viewing!
