Nordensa Young & Brilliant Awards

Welcome to a groundbreaking initiative that aims to recognize and celebrate football teams in European football that defy expectations and excel despite their younger squads and focus on developing talent.

Join us on this exciting journey as we explore the world of celebrating young and talented squads and shed light on their remarkable strategies and achievements.

How are the winners chosen? How does the Magic Happen?

Feature Selection

To create the index, we carefully selected two key features from the dataset. These features were chosen to capture vital aspects related to team performance, financial resources, and youth development in European football.

Points per Game (PPG)

This metric measures team performance by calculating the average points earned per game played. It allows for a fair comparison of teams across different competitions, accounting for variations in the number of matches played. PPG reveals how teams perform consistently regardless of the league format.

Difference in Average Age

This measure indicates a team's commitment to youth development. By calculating the difference between each team's average age and the maximum average age within their league, we identify clubs that prioritize nurturing and promoting young players.

Normalization

To ensure fair comparisons, we employed the min-max scaler to normalize the data for each selected feature. This process transforms the values of each feature to a standardized range of 0 to 1, eliminating potential biases arising from differing original scales.

Weighting Scheme

We assigned equal weights to both features in the index calculation. This reflects their shared importance in evaluating the performance of football clubs. The weights are proportionate to each other and sum up to 2, providing a balanced evaluation.

Ranking Computation

Our ranking computation involves comparing each team's feature values to an ideal reference point, representing the perfect combination of features. We calculate the Euclidean distance between a team and a theoretical perfect team (i.e., scoring the Max in PPG and Max in Difference in Average Age) to quantify their dissimilarity. Teams closer to the ideal values receive higher ranks, resulting in a comprehensive assessment of their performance relative to the index features.

The Minds Behind the Science

A world class scouting team led in this project by Luís Meireles - former Senior Psychologist at FC Porto for 14 years, who is a highly accomplished professional with a Ph.D. in Sport Psychology and a Master's degree in Data Science and Engineering.