{"id":5615,"date":"2018-06-29T08:00:54","date_gmt":"2018-06-29T08:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.viewsoftheworld.net\/?p=5615"},"modified":"2018-07-19T10:22:29","modified_gmt":"2018-07-19T10:22:29","slug":"sports-report-the-globalised-world-of-european-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.viewsoftheworld.net\/?p=5615","title":{"rendered":"Sports Report: The globalised world of European football"},"content":{"rendered":"

Football is a truly global phenomenon. Statistics about the real support are problematic, but there are estimates of up to 3.5 billion fans of football globally. A study conducted in 2006<\/a> by the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which represents 211 members as the global governing body of football, estimated 270 million people being active in football worldwide. FIFA\u2019s data give a rough idea of the global importance and global distribution of the phenomenon football, even if the numbers will have changed since this study was conducted.
\nFrom the statistics published, Asia emerged as the biggest player with 85 million footballers (Europe 62, Africa 46, North- and Central America with the Caribbean 43, South America 27, and Oceania 0.5 million). In terms of population share, Europe, South America and North\/Central America with the Caribbean are ahead of other regions with about 7 per cent of their respective populations.
\nEuropean football remains the most relevant globally, when it comes to the revenue of its national sports leagues. England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France (with Monaco) have the most profitable football leagues in the world. This makes the European administrative body, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) the perhaps most important of the six continental confederations that are part of FIFA.
\nUEFA consists of 55 national members, which in part are also on the Asian continent. According to their 2016 report<\/a>, 20344 players were participating in UEFA competitions back then. Here, geography plays an important role in understanding the global dynamics of football. European football leagues see significant inner-European flows of talents into the most prestigious leagues. But being such an important player internationally, 1374 international players from outside the UEFA countries compete in UEFA tournaments. In comparison, the largest single national representation from within Europe is that of Spain with 865 players. It should be noted that these numbers do only count those in the European competitions, rather than all players in national leagues.<\/p>\n

\"Cartogram<\/a>
\n(click for larger version)<\/a><\/p>\n

The cartogram above shows the share of international players in UEFA competitions. Each country outside UEFA is resized proportional to the number of players from there, and the ten largest countries are also labelled with their respective number of players. Countries that are members of UEFA as well as countries with no players are not changed and are shown in grey instead. The map shows how dominant African and South Americas countries are in these flows of international football migration into Europe.
\nIn addition to the cartogram, a treemap visualises the overall geographical distribution of players in UEFA competitions by country. The treemap uses nested rectangles ordered by absolute size to display the share of players from each country. It is similar to early forms of cartograms, but does not include the geographical location in its display in order to give the hierarchical structure (from large to small) more prominence.
\nIn the European-wide distribution of players it is interesting to observe that, despite large differences in the overall populations (as well as the active numbers of football players), the numbers of those who compete at European level seem much less apart from each other. The largest football nations do have the largest numbers, but with much smaller gaps to the smaller nations. England, for example, has only 2.4 times more players than Iceland in UEFA competitions, even if it is 164 times the population of Iceland. This is not least due the mobility of footballers and shows, how complex the geography of professional football has become.<\/p>\n

A modified version<\/a> of this map was published in the November 2016 edition<\/a> of Geographical Magazine<\/a>. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me<\/a> for further details on the terms of use.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Football is a truly global phenomenon. Statistics about the real support are problematic, but there are estimates of up to 3.5 billion fans of football globally. A study conducted in 2006 by the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[15,92,29,380,78,54,228,619,620],"class_list":["post-5615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maps","category-publications","tag-cartogram","tag-europe","tag-football","tag-geographical","tag-globalisation","tag-soccer","tag-sports","tag-treemap","tag-uefa"],"yoast_head":"\nSports Report: The globalised world of European football - Views of the World<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.viewsoftheworld.net\/?p=5615\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sports Report: The globalised world of European football - Views of the World\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Football is a truly global phenomenon. 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