San Mamés hosts the best women’s football match that can be seen in Europe. The two strongest teams of the moment will face each other, according to a new Elo ranking published by EL PAÍS.
Barcelona is the strongest team, with 2,154 points, and Olympique Lyon, second, with 2,133.
Elo ratings, originally from chess, are now used in many sports and games. on-line. Essentially, each team or player has an Elo rating, and exchanges points with their opponent when they face each other, depending on the result and their initial ratings. (If a strong team beats a very weak one, hardly any points are changed, because their victory was expected. On the other hand, if the weak wins, the exchange is great to incorporate the new information.)
These types of rankings are increasingly used in football. In 2018, for example, FIFA improved its world team ranking by adopting an Elo system. However, there is no established ranking for women’s football clubs. That is why we have calculated our own Elo ranking, as explained in the methodology, with data from thousands of official matches since the 2009-2010 season.
The classification confirms Barça and Lyon as the best. It is not difficult to explain his spectacular record of recent years. The Catalans have won the last five leagues and two Champions Leagues (2021 and 2023), until they placed first in Elo. The French, who had dominated sufficiently between 2017 and 2023, have won 17 of 18 leagues in their country and eight continental trophies in these years.
The rest of the Spanish teams are left behind. Real Madrid still appears far from the best (with 1,831 points), although its rise since its creation has been meteoric: in four years they rose from 39th place to 11th place. They are followed by two teams with tradition, Levante (1,762) and Atlético of Madrid (1,770). Atlético has won three league titles in the last decade, being Barcelona’s main rival.
Our classification places Barcelona and Lyon with similar strengths, but we must consider the former favorites. This is what the bets say: they give Barça a 75% chance of victory, compared to 25% for the French.
What can explain this difference? Perhaps another relevant fact: the level of the players on each team.
There are three Barça footballers among the five with the highest market value
A shortcut to compare the level of the squads is to look at the valuation in euros of each player. There Barcelona stands out: its squad has an estimated market value of 5.6 million euros, according to the specialized website Soccerdona. It is more than any other club in the world, with quite a difference over Chelsea (4.1 million) and Olympique (4).
The following graph shows the Elo rating and squad value of all clubs in the five major European leagues:
Barcelona has in its ranks the most valuable player of the moment, Aitana Bonmatí. The midfielder, current Ballon d’Or winner and best player at the last World Cup, has a market value of 650,000 euros. In the top five there are two other Barça players, Alexia Putellas (500,000 euros) and Caroline Graham Hansen (500,000), who share the second step with Chelsea star Sam Kerr (500,000). Lyon’s most valuable player, Ada Hegerberg, appears in fifth place.
In the following search engine you can consult the market value of thousands of players from the five major leagues. At the top of that list a pattern emerges: among the 50 there are 29 who are English or Spanish, the two teams that played in the final of the last World Cup. The leagues of these two countries have also very quickly become the best women’s soccer leagues.
The Bonmatí effect
The Catalan player was already the most valuable last year, but this season she has increased her value another 10%. The explanation seems simple: her statistics show incredible performance.
Bonmatí appears among the midfielders in the best 1% in a lot of metrics: for goals, for goals generated, for deep drives, for assists and for touches in the opponent’s area. And he is in the 5% of almost any attack statistic, from passing to dribbling, both for contributing to creation and finishing, in a combination that almost no athlete achieves.
Note: by passing the mouse over each metric you can see the absolute value (for example, the number of goals) and its percentile (99 means being in that area among the best 1% of footballers in your position). Some statistics on the graph capture potential. For example, goals count the number of goals scored per 90 minutes of play; On the other hand, expected goals measure the probability of scoring from a player’s shots – depending on her position, the type of shot or the positioning of the defenders – regardless of whether the shot ends in a goal or not.
Methodology
To calculate the ranking we have processed the results of more than 20,000 matches, from statistics portals FBref and flash core.
Each team starts in the ranking with 1,500 points and in each match it plays it exchanges points with the rival team according to a Elo formula. We have used a parameter k 40 for Champions League matches and 20 for league matches, so the former have more weight.
The exchange of points is done game by game, sequentially, to obtain the evolution of the Elo of each team.
The market value data for female players comes from the specialized portal Soccerdonna.
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