Analysis of football player careers

I shall introduce the data set of football player careers that played in EPL in the seasons of 1992-2006. The data set was introduced and analyzed in the book "Understanding Large Temporal Networks and Spatial Networks" (Wiley, 2014) as an example of large temporal network.

With exploratory network analysis methods we tried to verify some general beliefs as: EPL clubs prefer repeated transactions with other clubs; there exists a set of fundamental player routes to EPL etc.

On the other hand footballer career path shows football player quality over time. This can be evaluated with clubs' absolute ranks. Many new statistical analyses are possible on so adjusted data. We started with clustering (searching for general career paths for footballers that had in the time of their career played in EPL).