Identifying patterns in the top 5 leagues: what factors into the market value of the players?

Abstract

This study was developed for FPF (Federação Portuguesa de Futebol) and aims to understand the different trends of the transfer market for the top 5 leagues and compare it with the Portuguese league. The study follows a quantitative data methodology, utilizing a dataset from transfermarket.com concerning transfers from the last 10 years with 44,321 rows and 23 columns. It was concluded that the most similar to the Portuguese league is the French league because some trends can be identified in both of them. Also, some correlations were identified between the fee paid, the minutes played and team performance on the national and international levels.