Semifinalists Show that There’s No Place Like Home When You’re Picking Your Team

The collective wisdom is that it’s good for a national team to have players playing in the big leagues outside their own country. If your players are good enough to get noticed by, say, the English Premier League, it means they’re extremely good. And that can only be good for the national team. Right?

Egypt shattered that belief in the African Cup of Nations this year, demolishing star-heavy, European-based teams like Ivory Coast on their way to winning the Cup. I remember noticing in Egypt’s first game that they were already playing cohesively, like a team that had spent a lot of time on the field together. And I also noticed that the vast majority of their players plied their trade in the Egyptian league.

The Euros are also proving that there’s no place like home for picking a squad, at least in the knockout stages. In each of the first three games, the teams with the most domestic players went through. The teams with the most foreign-based players went home. (In the Italy-Spain game, the majority of players on both teams play domestically, so this wasn’t an issue.)

Here are the stats, based on the 23-player final squad lists. (And this is just based on quick-and-dirty Wikipedia flag-counting, so I’m not guaranteeing that it’s 100% accurate. But it’s definitely close enough to draw conclusions.):

QF Winners All less than 25% playing outside the country

Russia — 1 player playing outside of the country
Turkey – 5 players playing outside of the country
Germany — 3 players playing outside of the country
Spain – 5 players playing outside of the country*

QF Losers:

Netherlands — 14 players playing outside of the country
Croatia — 22 players playing outside of the country
Portugal — 12 players playing outside of the country
Italy — 4 players playing outside of the country*

Of course, we only have to look at England to see that this isn’t definitive. In England’s current squad, only David Beckham plays abroad. And we know all how far that got them.

There are also plenty of other factors affecting how teams play in tournaments. For example having a player on the roster of a huge club doesn’t mean that player is seeing time on the field.

But I’m curious as to what you think about this. High percentage of domestic players: Statistical anomaly, or competitive advantage?

*In the Italy-Spain game, both teams have less than 25% of the squad playing outside of the country, so this was not an issue in that game.