An analysis of relations among European countries based on UEFA European football championship

Abstract

With the increasing globalization in the 21st century, football has become more of an industry than a sport that supports tremendous amount of money circulation. More players started to play in countries different from their original nationality. Some countries used this evolution process of football to improve the quality of their leagues. The clubs in these leagues recruited the best players from all around the world. In international football, nations are represented by their best players, and these players might come from a variety of different leagues. To observe the countries that host the best players of these nations, we analyze the trend for the nations represented in the European Football Championship. We construct social networks for the last eight tournaments from 1992 to 2020 and calculate network-level metrics for each. We find the most influential countries for each tournament and analyze the relationship between country influence and economic revenue of football in those countries. We use several clustering algorithms to pinpoint the communities in obtained social networks and discuss the relevance of our findings to cultural and historical events.