Comparing leagues

[FrancescoOleni]

During the club season or international competitions, it's quite usual to compare different players at different skills.
Sometimes, you should need to compare them across different leagues or competitions.
So if in a specific country they serve really hard, it could be difficult to compare receivers from that country with receivers from other countries. Same thing with other skills or situations.

Reading a book about soccer, I started to wonder about the fact that the players leaving a league and joining another league could be helpful to measure the difference between them.

If "most of the players" coming from the French League and joining the Italian A1 League drop their level at serve, maybe in Italy there are better receivers.
What if we track those little changes for many many (al the) players? We could consider just objective data (ace, error, kill, block...).

Does it make any sense?

[raymondben]

Sounds like a fun project! I'd be interested in having a play with this. Yes, we'd probably have to do a fair number of players to be able to smooth out individual differences. We could also think about adjusting for things like player career stage - a player who is early in their career might be expected to improve their performance from one year to the next, whereas a player close to retirement (who might be moving "down" in leagues) might do the opposite. Factoring out that variation might give a clearer picture of the league signal.

[FrancescoOleni]

We could also think about adjusting for things like player career stage - a player who is early in their career might be expected to improve their performance from one year to the next, whereas a player close to retirement (who might be moving "down" in leagues) might do the opposite. Factoring out that variation might give a clearer picture of the league signal.

Totally agree! And we could also "measure" in somehow this variation.