Assessing Top Soccer Player Statistics

INFO 2950 Project

Abstract

This report researches the relationships in statistics with top scoring soccer players across various leagues from the 2021 season from api-football.com. It contains information on the top 20 scorers of the top 27 teams, such as height, weight, age and statistics related to their gameplay such as total goals made and number of minutes played. Our research answers two questions: 1) What factors influence booking frequency of players? 2) Does aggressiveness differ between European and non-European leagues?

From our analysis, we found that player rating was the only significant predictor of booking frequency and determined with 95% confidence that non-highly rated players are booked more than highly rated players. Of our four proxies for aggressiveness, only total duels and goals per game were significant predictors of league. Of those, we found that total duels differed between European and non-European leagues, but goals per minute did not. We are also 95% confident that European leagues duel more than non-European leagues. However, do to a lack of significant findings for research question 2, is still difficult to extrapolate conclusions about aggressiveness between the leagues.