Finding Similar European Soccer Clubs (with R & Shiny)

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Are you a die-hard supporter of one European soccer (football) team (club)? Having a rough season, or just want to watch more matches with passion?

This European Team Finder analyzed 126 attributes of the top-flight teams in the marquee national leagues of Europe. Everything was considered, such as tackles, fouls, pass type, crosses, throw-ins, shots by body part, set pieces, and aerial battles.
  • England’s Premier League
  • France’s Ligue Un
  • German’s Bundesliga
  • Italy’s Serie A
  • Spain’s La Liga
Just select a team you already like and the widget instantly displays the most similar team from each of the leagues, along with the least similar team in cause you love to hate (Spurs?).

Under the hood, similarity is quantified in R by creating a Euclidean distance matrix. The resulting matrix is displayed by loading it into Shiny, then accessing the closest/farthest distances for a selected club.

Raw data was sourced from the excellent website whoscored.com.

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