Following the positive impact of our Transfer Analysis Report about the Belgian Pro League, we conducted the same research for another league focusing on player development, the Portuguese Primeira Liga.
Starting from the same premises, we strongly believe that clubs focusing on their player profile definitions will eventually get the players that fit the best in their philosophy. Not all clubs (should) have a well-defined game model they should follow unrelated to their opponent, but they should all have some core principles and values.
In this report, we focused on the efficiency of the Scouting and Recruitment process in the Portuguese Primeira Liga, a league that is known for selling players to the big European Leagues, but also a league that has one of the lowest spending on transfer fees in the European first divisions.
First, some important notes:
- We listed all the incoming transfers of the clubs for the 2023-2024 season, together with their transfer values and ages.
- Per transfer, we calculated the percentage of the total minutes this transfer played during the regular season.
- Per team:
- We calculated the average percentage of total minutes played for a transfer
- We calculated the average age of the transfers.
- We calculated the price weighted average percentage of total minutes played for a transfer, where the weight is proportional with the transfer value of the player. Thus, if an expensive player did not get a lot of minutes, it will affect the weighted average percentage more than for a less expensive player.
Our main findings are:
- Boavista is leading the table on the Percentage of Total minutes played by a transfer with 74.5% and scores a Weighted percentage of 78.8%. They only signed two players, which were a hit taking advantage of the fact that they both were at the club before on loan, so Boavista didn’t invested much this season but what they invested, made an impact.
- Sporting CP score really well on the weighted percentage which is also a lot higher than their % of total minutes, showing that the players where they invested more money in, made the biggest impact.
- A club that did not focused on the "Buy to Sell" mentality was Braga with the average age of the signings at 27. They invested in more experienced players, and the minutes played on both metrics show that steady decision.
- Surprisingly, we see Benfica at the near bottom of the table, with 24.4% on the percentage of total minutes and 30.4 % on the weighted percentage. But its very important to say that they signed some very young players from South American markets, like Gianluca Prestrianni and Benjamin Rollheiser and neither of them played much this season, so they affect significantly this table but they can become very well aligned with the Club strategy and business plan to Develop these very young players and get them ready for the big stage on the long term.
- Vizela has impacted with the weighted percentage of a leading 87.3%. This is due to the fact that the player where they Invested more money was also the player with the biggest impact on the field, with the French striker Essende.
Before you jump to conclusions, we are aware at MyGamePlan that this report needs a lot of nuances.
We don’t know the strategy of the clubs signing the players, a player might be bought to perform in 2 to 3 seasons. Or the low playing percentage might be the result of uncontrollable factors such as e.g. injuries. We also did not include the actual performance of the player. A new signing might be getting a decent amount of minutes in a season, but when he is underperforming it might still be a bad signing.
But it does give you a general overview of the scouting & recruitment of a club and how clubs are approaching transfers. Are they buying players that fit their principles, vision and style of play or do they not succeed to find players that match with their club or coaching staff.
