Soccer Enjoyment Index

I created this index to measure a persons ability to enjoy soccer in their country through many factors. These factors include international success, club success on the international stage, league ranks, league title races, as well as the stadiums and atmospheres.

These things are important to me as I am a very big soccer fan. I weighted the international success as the most important things as national pride is a huge part of many soccer enjoying countries and a national team is  something that many people come together to support. The next greatest weighing would probably be the atmospheres as soccer is a sport where even division two teams and teams struggling often sell out stadiums and still have many very passionate fans.  The league title races are also important as in some leagues there is constant changes in the teams looking to win the league compared to some like the Bundesliga where one team won the league 13 years in a row relatively comfortably. The league races, and club success on the international stage are equally important in my opinion as club success internationally is one of the ultimate forms of club glory in things like the champions league. Lastly, i have the league rank, although it seems very important, most of the passion from fans is not actually based on the leagues compared to each other, this is shown throughout the amazing atmospheres in many lower divisions across the globe. Many of these things are very closely important and there wont be any really massive difference in their weighting in order to make the full index. from this I decided to have the scale be out of 100 where the weighting goes as follows.

1. 25% International success: This takes into account FIFA national ranks which is a valuable tool as it takes many things into account pertaining to recent success. 200 points which we would split by giving the number one country 200 points then going down by one for each place in the rankings.

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2. 20% Stadiums and atmospheres: This one is more of a 12.5% for each stadium rank as well as atmosphere ranks as they are both equally important to the enjoyment of fans worldwide. We would divide 160 (80 for stadium and 80 for atmosphere) total points between the stadiums/atmospheres in the mostly first and second division. To find the total out of each 80 we would divide each one by the number of teams being measured then assign them a score from 0 to the number we get from dividing. Then take the average of that score and multiply it by the number of teams to get the score out of 160.

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3. 20% Club success on the international stage: This takes into account how countries clubs have done in international competitions such as champions leagues and club world cups. We would mostly measure this by taking each league and giving each country a maximum of 160 points, they would get these points by getting 20 points for a champions league final, 10 for a semi and then dividing each of those by 2 into things like the Europa and then dividing by 2 again for the Europa conference league, essentially the second and third tier continental competitions which would vary by name in each continent.

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4. 20% League competitiveness: This takes into account things like the average point margin between the league champions and the rest of the league as well as things like how many different clubs have won the league recently. 

To do this we would also split the 160 total points into 80 for average point margin and 80 for amount of different clubs in the last 20 years. For the first 80 we would divide the 80 points by the average point margin in the last 20 years and for the second 80 we would divide it by 20 years to get 4 and then multiply that number by how many different teams have won it during that period.

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5. 15% League rank: This is taken from many different online sources and is basically just how well teams in different leagues stack up against each other. 120 points, we would get this by giving the number 1 league 120 points and then going down by one for each place in the rankings.

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My focus country of Spain performs very high on this index for many reasons. It's national team was ranked number 6th in the country which gives it a large boost on the highest weighted part of the index. It also has pretty good atmospheres  and great club success on the international stage. However Spain also had some things that brought it lower than other countries with big leagues. For example only 3 clubs have won it in the last 20 years and had a decent point margin average at about 7 points. However it was also boosted by the fact La Liga was ranked as the best league in the world which gave it an extra 120 points. The final score I got for Spain was 674. 

Algeria was a different story however, although their national team wasn't that low at 35th. Their stadiums and atmospheres were not too bad either but definitely paled compared to most European leagues. Its clubs also haven't done too well internationally and the country only received a 30 for that section. The league competitiveness was relatively normal and its league rank was pretty low as well. It received a total of 408 points out of 800. This kinda showed some flaws in the index such as the huge drop off from the top in talent not having a great effect.

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I think that my index did a decent job but definitely had its strengths and weaknesses. I think the one of the main issues with my index is how subjective this all is, atmospheres and things like that really depend on each region, country and even person. For example, many people would weigh these things differently than me. Another huge weakness is that it only really works super well in places like Europe where soccer is a really big part of the culture there. An example of this is the MLS compared to the leagues in Europe. The MLS is ranked 9th in the world which compared to a country like Spain is only a difference of 8 points out of 800 in the final rankings. The problem with this is that no team in the MLS would really have much of a chance to take on any of the teams in La Liga. An example of how far apart the leagues are is the MLS all star game. The best players in the MLS came together to form an all league team only to get beat 5-0 by Arsenal.

I think this index could've worked really well if there were less points and were only really used to categorize the top 10 soccer loving countries in the world to really work as intended.

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