ADF DVT: Analyzing Financial Position of the European Football (Soccer) Leagues using Treemap

We all know a lot of money is involved with professional sports. One of Europe’s major sports is football (or soccer as some like to call it). A lot of money changes in hand in football. And it seems that the results are determined primarily by the money. The major pan-European competition – the UEFA Champion’s League- is called out of reach for representatives from smaller countries – because of their lag in terms of yearly budget. And the national leagues are dominated by [clubs that have the] money.

Together with my son Tobias we decided to investigate. How much money is in the budgets for all clubs taken together in each of the major football leagues? And how is that money distributed over the clubs. Is it evenly allocated or are there wild variations? And is money a guarantee for success?

We decided to use the ADF DVT Treemap component to visualize our findings. From left to right, you see four treemaps, representing the football leagues of England, Spain, Germany and The Netherlands. The size of each treemap corresponds with the sum of all club budgets in that league. Inside the treemap, each area represents a club. The size of the area corresponds with the budget of the club. The color is an indication of the current ranking of the club in the league. Yellow (gold), Gray (Silver) and Olive (Bronze) represents the number 1, 2 and 3 position. The Legend explains about all colors.

The German Bundesliga has a higher budget than the Primera Division – and both trail behind the Premier League. It is clear how the Dutch is the dwarf in this collection. Its overall (league) budget is less than the club budget for both Barcelona and Real Madrid. It is also clear how the Spanish competition has two main contenders that dwarf the others. Valencia’s budget – #3 in Spain – is smaller than PSV’s – #2 in The Netherlands. The budget size seems a good indication for who will come at the top of the list. Only Real Madrid is not at the very top despite having the largest budget in Spain – although it is the runner up.

Implementation

The implementation of this treemap is done using a trio simple POJOs: FootballClub, FootballLeague and FootballInvestigator.

In FootballInvestigator, the data is hard coded:

Next, this class is published as Data Control, resulting in the following Data Control Palette:

A new JSF page is created. The the Club collection is dragged to this new page, and dropped as a Treemap:

The Treemap is subsequently configured like this:

Then the page source is extended a little, with a PanelGridLayout and stuff:

Notice the af:iterator that iterates over the leaguesIterator (the master for the clubs) that was created in the PageDef when the treemap binding for the clubs was added. Also worth mentioning: references – in the inlineStyle attribute for the scaleFactor that is used to manipulate the height –  and in the outputText that renders the name of each competition and ensures that the master iterator moves from league to league in each iteration.

The iteratorBean is configured in request scope and contains the following code:

Credits: I would like to thank Tobias Jellema for doing the research and compiling the numbers for this article.

Resources

Download JDeveloper 11gR1 PS6 (11.1.1.7) application: FootballFinanceTreemap .

The Deloitte Football Money Report 2013.