Historically, Serie A has always been regarded as a difficult league for the development of young talent, as it offers few opportunities for emerging players to showcase their skills and potential. This study explores a critical aspect of Italy’s top football league: the minutes played by under-21 players and, more specifically, by Italian under-21 players in Serie A.
The goal is to analyse the trends and patterns that have developed over the course of the various seasons, shedding light on the evolution of the role and impact of young talent in one of Europe’s leading soccer leagues.
The study will relate how regulation change, has positively or negatively affected the opportunities allowed to promising young players. This research meticulously examines data over the years, analysing the minutes played by under-21 players and the subset of Italian under-21 players. These data are used to determine the influence on two different phenomena. The minutes played by the under-21 are related and cause the revenue of the Serie A teams, while the minutes played by the Italian under-21 do not cause results of the Italian National team. The results of this research aim to provide valuable information for football fans, analysts and stakeholders, offering a nuanced understanding of the approach of the Italian Top League of football to nurture and integrate young talents.
Data structure:
- classifica: all the result table for Serie A from 1967-1968 season to 2022-2023
- transfer: all the transfer market movements for Serie A from 1992-1993 season to 2022-2023
- transfermarket: minutes played by under-21 player for Serie A from 1967-1968 season to 2022-2023 scrapped by Transfermarket
- data:
- ITACPI: Consumer Price Index which measures the overall change in consumer prices
- Punti_Nazionale_Under21: the performance of the Italian under 21 national team from 1993-1994 to 2022-2023
- Ranking_Italy: Italy FIFA Ranking calculated from 1993-1994 to 2022-2023
- Under21_minutes_played: total minutes played by under-21 players for each season from 1967-1968 to 2022-2023
- Under21_minutes_played_teams: all teams participating in league championships from 1967-1968 to 2022-2023 with minutes granted to under-21 player
Code structure:
- request_get.py: functions for scraping data
- utility.py: functions to speed up statistical tests
- 1_data_acquisition.ipynb: notebook to acquire and process data
- 2_data_visualization.ipynb: notebook to visualise data
- 3_changepoint_algo_Rbeast.ipynb: notebook to apply the Changepoint Algorithm and Mann-Kendall Test
- 4_granger_causality_ccn: notebook to apply Granger Causality Test and Cross Correlation Function