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5. Conclusions and Final Thoughts
Previous: K-Means Clustering of Teams Based on Performances
The main research of this project was: Which soccer league is the most competitive? To answer this question, I analyzed team performances (focusing on points per game, win proportions, and points after each week in a season) in four leagues: the Bundesliga (in Germany), La Liga (in Spain), the Major League Soccer (MLS in the United States), and the Premier League (EPL in England). Both exploratory data analysis and k-means clustering showed that the MLS is the most competitive, with the highest balance among teams.
The European leagues are quite similar to one another in terms of competitive balance. If I had to rank them, the Bundesliga would probably be the most unbalanced, followed closely by the EPL, and finally La Liga. The Bundesliga appears even more uncompetitive (and rather predictable) if we consider the fact that only one team (Bayern Munich) have won the Bundesliga in all five seasons (from 2015/16 to 2019/20). The EPL also lacks competitive balance and has, for the last decade, been dominated by a small subset of teams collectively known as "The Big Six". La Liga might be the least unbalanced of the three leagues, but it is still far from balance and lacks competitiveness, with only 22.22% of teams managing to break into the top 4 positions and only two teams (Barcelona and Real Madrid) winning the league in all five seasons.
The lack of competitive balance (as well as the decrease thereof over the years) in the European leagues has been attributed both to improvements in performance of a few big clubs (e.g., Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Real Madrid) and to the quick financial growth of such clubs. The latter allows them to spend more money both on upgrading training facilities and on buying high-quality players, which in turn increases their success on the pitch.
With regard to the comparison between the European leagues and the MLS, the results might have been confounded by the fact that the MLS is played in a slightly different format from the other leagues. In the European leagues, teams face each of their opponents twice in a season, one at home and one away. In the MLS, teams are divided into the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference; teams play against each of their conference opponents twice, but face each of the teams from the other conference only once. Thus, if we define competitive balance as the degree to which teams are evenly matched on their ability to win, then, for the MLS, it is impossible to measure competitive balance in its complete sense, because not all teams play against all other teams in the league the same number of times (twice). Future research should look for ways to tackle this issue and try to come up with a good measure of competitive balance in the MLS.