INVESTIGATING THE UNDERLYING CAUSAL NETWORK ON EUROPEAN FOOTBALL TEAMS.

Football, or soccer, is considered one of the most important collective sports in the world. Managers, specialists and fans are always trying to find out the important keys to have a good team. The evaluation of the team quality may present many variables and subjective concepts, and for this reason, it is not simple to answer the following question: How to define quality? Another point that should be considered is the importance of aspects such as offensive and defensive: Which one is more important to measure quality of a football team? For this task, we propose the use of a causal model with latent variables as a tool to measure the subjectivity of the team quality and how it can be affected by other aspects. Information from the four most important football leagues in the world (England, Germany, Italy and Spain) during three seasons (2011-2012; 2012-2013; 2013-2014) was collected. We defined the latent variables in the model and evaluated the relationships among them. The results show that the offensive aspect exert more influence on team quality than defensive aspect, which reflects directly on the players market strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]