transfers
Data on European football clubs' player transfers, as found on Transfermarkt, since the 1992/93 season.
IMPORTANT: As of July 2022, transfer fees are now in EUR (taken from the .com Transfermarkt site), not GBP (taken from the .co.uk Transfermarkt site) due to a distortion of older fees being converted with a recent exchange rate.
Contents
Data
Transfers can be found in the data/ directory, in .csv format. There's a file for each of these leagues:
- English Premier League (
premier-league.csv) - English Championship (
championship.csv) - French Ligue 1 (
ligue-1.csv) - German 1.Bundesliga (
1-bundesliga.csv) - Italian Serie A (
serie-a.csv) - Spanish La Liga (
primera-division.csv) - Portugese Liga NOS (
liga-nos.csv) - Dutch Eredivisie (
eredivisie.csv) - Russian Premier Liga (
premier-liga.csv)
Common variables:
| Header | Description | Data Type |
|---|---|---|
club_name |
name of club | text |
player_name |
name of player | text |
position |
position of player | text |
club_involved_name |
name of secondary club involved in transfer | text |
fee |
raw transfer fee information | text |
transfer_movement |
transfer into club or out of club? | text |
transfer_period |
transfer window (summer or winter) | text |
fee_cleaned |
numeric transformation of fee, in EUR millions |
numeric |
league_name |
name of league club_name belongs to |
text |
year |
year of transfer | text |
season |
season of transfer (interpolated from year) |
text |
country |
country of league | text |
Config
config/league-meta.csv- leagues to scrape
New leagues can be exported by adding rows to the config/league-meta.csv file. Required columns are league_name, league_id and country. To get league_name and league_id, extract these from the transfermarkt URL for any leagues' transfer history:
www.transfermarkt.com/{LEAGUE_NAME}/transfers/wettbewerb/{LEAGUE_ID}/
When scraping new leagues, it is recommended to remove all the leagues that data has already been downloaded from (i.e. only include new leagues). This cuts on processing time and stress on servers.
Code
R:
src/scrape-summer.R: retrieves latest summer window's data and appends new observations to CSVs indata/scr/scrape-winter.R: retrieves latest winter window's data and appends new observations to CSVs indata/src/scrape-history.R: retrieves transfer history by league and exports to CSVs indata/src/functions.R: local R functions used elsewhere
Source
All squad data was scraped from Transfermarkt, in accordance with their terms of use.