The first football transfer ever for a fee of over £100 was Scottish striker Willie Groves when he was signed by Aston Villa from West Bromwich in 1893, just eight years after the Football Association (FA) recognizes professionalism in football. The football transfer system had kept relatively stable since then until the famous Bosman ruling in 1995. The ruling allowed players in the European Union (EU) to join any other club in the EU after their contracts expired without a transfer fee, which significantly encourages players' movement because their original clubs cannot block their their moves anymore. After 1995, the rules of football transfer become much more complete. For example, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) formally implemented a transfer window for a season starting 2002-03 season, restraining the time of football transfers and ensuring the stability of each club's roster. There have been also more and more record-breaking transfers since then: the world transfer record was broken eight times from 1996 to 2001!
Nowadays, transfers have become an essential part of football. Most football clubs assemble their squads through signing players from other clubs. The football powerhouses absorb the best football talents around the world, increasing the competitiveness of continental competitions like the UEFA Champions League. On the other hand, selling players to larger clubs has been the major source of income for smaller clubs, suggesting the fundamental ability of transfers to support the football ecosystem. Transfers have also become a big economic deal: transfer fees have been rapidly increasing since 1995. Today, the most expensive transfer ever is Neymar when he was signed by Paris Saint-Germain for £198m/€222m from Barcelona in 2017, which is also the first ever transfer with its fee surpassing £100 million.
Our project is a visualization about football transfer market focusing on variables including clubs, leagues, years, player ages, player positions, and transfer fees. Our dataset was gathered from the Transfermarkt website. We scraped the transfer data from the past 30 seasons (i.e. since 1994-95 season) from seven major European football leagues including Bundesliga (GER), Eredivisie (NED), Liga Portugal (POR), Ligue 1 (FRA), Premier League (ENG), La Liga (ESP), and Serie A (ITA). We created five visualizations, attempting to illustrate the relationship between the aforementioned variables. You can access them through the navigation bar on the top.