Seminario Pedro Luis Gómez

Pedro Luis Gómez (EUNCET) will present his paper “Analysis of volatility and performance in the five major European leagues using PCA and clustering algorithms,” alongside José Torres-Remírez (EUNCET).

Abstract

Professional football has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades, establishing itself as a significant economic sector. In the 2022/2023 season, revenues from top-tier European football exceeded €25.6 billion, with the five major leagues —LaLiga (Spain), the Premier League (England), the Bundesliga (Germany), Serie A (Italy), and Ligue 1 (France)— accounting for over 67% of that total. This growth has reinforced the importance of analyzing competitive balance as a key dimension to ensure both the sustainability and appeal of the sporting spectacle.In the field of sports economics, competitive balance has been addressed through a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. However, traditional metrics—both static and dynamic—are often insufficient to capture the structural and evolutionary complexity of professional leagues. In response, this study proposes a new approach based on dimensionality reduction techniques (PCA) and unsupervised clustering (K-Means), aimed at analyzing the structural performance and competitive volatility of teams from a comparative and longitudinal perspective.The research is structured in two complementary phases. The first applies average team-level values to identify shared structural patterns across leagues. The second phase extends the analysis to the season level, assessing relative volatility by tracking changes in cluster assignments over time. This dual perspective enables the characterization of both the static configuration of leagues and their internal dynamics of competitive mobility, offering a robust and innovative quantitative approach.