Issue number 175 of the CIES Football Observatory Weekly Post presents a networked representation of fee paying deals having involved big-5 league teams during the last transfer window. Clubs in the five major European championships have invested a record amount of 742 million € to sign new players. The previous record, 523 million €, was established in 2011.

Issue number 174 of the CIES Football Observatory Weekly Post presents players who made their debut in the professional game after July 1st 2016 fielded during the current season in domestic league matches by a big-5 league club. The analysis notably highlights the key role played by the French top division in the promotion of young talents.

Issue number 173 of the CIES Football Observatory Weekly Post presents the gap between the value of squads and transfer fee expenditure to assemble them. This analysis allows us highlighting the most and least efficient clubs from a player economic valorisation perspective. For the vast majority of teams, the gap is positive. Indeed, the study does not take into account costs that the replacement of squad members would generate.

Neymar is by far the big-5 league player with the highest transfer value. The Brazilian prodigy outranks Lionel Messi and Paul Pogba. Data presented in issue number 172 of the Weekly Post is computed by means of the exclusive CIES Football Observatory transfer value algorithm.

Year after year, the CIES Football Observatory research team has developed a powerful approach for the technical analysis of player performance. On the basis of this methodology, issue number 171 of the Weekly Post presents the 10 best performing big-5 league players per position. Cristiano Ronaldo heads the table for forwards ahead of Lionel Messi.

Issue number 170 of the CIES Football Observatory Weekly Post presents the number of players fielded in domestic league matches from July 1st 2016 onwards by clubs in 31 top division leagues of UEFA member associations. The record values were observed for the Finnish champions Mariehamn (17 players) and the Croatian side RNK Split (37 players).