Missing ESM Team of the Month

Wasn't Keir Radnedge the chief editor when this ESM team of the month thing was started?

https://twitter.com/KeirRadnedge

Maybe he knows more?

 

Much love, dude. Thanks! From checking my mags, it looks like I'm still missing the ESM teams of Oct and Nov 2001. I assume they were published in Dec 01 and Jan 02 issues? That should be everything. Too bad about the May 2002, hopefully it'll be their only omission.

I'll post some results here once I've eventually tallied them.

 

I've started work, and noticed there are a bunch of Teams of the Month missing from World Soccer. Like at least once a year they forget about it. Anybody know if the other ESMs offered the TotM with full results? Predictably WS hasn't responded to my mail. I'll try a few other times before I'll give up, though. They're not getting rid of me that easy.

Anybody know what's the easiest way to make sortable graphs? Does Excel or Open Office offer this? I'd like to make a graph where I can switch between alphabetical order and the order of most appearances.

 

Oh man, World Soccer is even worse than I thought! I thought I'd only have to hunt the 90s stuff, but now I notice they also botched the 08-09 and 09-10 seasons. They only have the winners on the mag, with a "visit out website for more info" message, and you can guess how well that works. I used archive.org and managed to hunt down some of them, but still missing about half of the months. Are there any other similar websites that allow you to scroll old sites?

I also started messaging some of the individuals and not just WS itself for the 90s stuff. Seeing as they can't even keep track of 2 month old TotMs, I don't expect to see any 20-year old ones. Too bad, the pre-Bosman year would have been great to see.

I think the full votes really offer an excellent look into the footballing world during the last 20 years. Not just the biggest stars, but all the secondary stars and one-season wonders. I think you guys will be impressed with the results once you see them, incomplete or not.

Comme, one more request: If you got 'em, can you get scans of the ESM-page from issues that have the entire team of the season and full votes for the years 13-14, 15-16 and 16-17? 13-14 should at least have them, not sure how they do it these days.

 

Ok, the first version of my somewhat full-ish ESM-table is ready to be revealed to the public.

Finally you can see not just the big stars (Guess what? Somebody voted for Messi!), but all the secondary stars, one season wonders and obscure joke-votes!
Was Van Buyten any good or not? The ESM-table will tell you!
Remember when Diego Tristan was the hottest striker in the world? The ESM-table does! How about all those next big Brazilian things? Ailton, Marcio Amoroso, Ricardo Oliveira, Afonso Alves, Grafite. All here in the ESM-table!
The ESM-table has not just all your favorite stars and many cult players, but also bunch of guys you never even knew existed. Now you can spend hours figuring out what Pedrosa or Pignol did to get somebody's vote. If you know who or what a Bema is, feel free to tell me!


I believe this table gives a very comprehensive look at the footballing world during the last 20 years or so. From the votes you can see not only which players, but also which teams, had a glorious or disappointing season and when. I have plans to make comparisons between the ESM-votes and the Ballon D'or, to see how much correlation or divergence there is. In a way I consider these votes a more accurate representation of the best players than the Ballon. The table is free of tournament-bias, and all the votes have been given when everything was still fresh in mind and not months afterwards. A weakness it has is that one spectacular or high-profile moment can earn several votes during one month and obscure the votes. You'll never guess how Carlos Alberto got those votes in 2003-2004! So the smaller the vote amount, the less reliable it gets.


Hopefully all the data is easy to read. For easier use, I divided the players by position. Apologies if somebody's in the wrong place. I had to make quick decisions and with some players it's hard to tell. I divided the data into 5-year eras. At the end of each era I've added the total of votes for every player. During one season the votes can go several ways, but a 5-year total is very effective in showing the top players of that era.

I sorted the results in a Pivot Table (thanks for the tip!), so you can sort the table in annual, 5-year total, or alphabetical order. LMK what you guys think.

 

I tell ya, finding this stuff wasn't always easy! World Soccer was really lazy with all that ESM-stuff, and as you can tell from earlier posts, I was missing a bunch of votes. With dedicated data-finding, I managed to find a lot of the missing votes. Tipsbladet helped me with the 2008-2010 stuff, and I used several different digital archives to find some of the other missing data.

That said, I'm still missing the votes from several months. It's a bummer, because as you can see from the table, the votes are very tight, so even one month's votes can make a big difference for the final results. I'm particularly bummed by the entirely missing first two seasons, because I'd love to get a complete late-90s representation. WS hasn't answered my mails, of course.

Here's a list of the missing votes:
All from 1995-1996 and 1996-1997 seasons.
Sep 97
Feb 98
Apr 98
May 98
Jan 99
Oct 99
Mar 01
Oct 01
Oct 08
Feb 09
Oct 09

Here's where I'm requesting for more help from Bigsoccer members. Does anybody read any of the other ESM-magazines, or know if they published the full results on their magazine or website?

 

Thanks, mate! The Oct 01 team should be available in a WS-issue, I just don't own it. The 08-09 stuff can be reasonably expected to be found somewhere in the net at some point, but the older stuff can be a tall order, unless I can get some of the official participants to co-operate.

If anybody has access to old issues of ESM-member magazines it would help, even if just to confirm they didn't publish any of the votes.

 

I don't think they published the complete votes consistently and when they did I noticed occasional (slight) differences with what World Soccer published.

 

Good news, people! Success! I e-mailed ESM directly, and received a response from Kicker. Turns out they were interested in my little project, and did have all the votes published since day . Trust the Germans to keep track of their statistics! The result now is that I have all the votes available except for one month! Why one month? It looks like there was a computer error or something in Kicker that month, and all the votes are shown empty. I think it's a problem with the published version and not the scan I received. Still, this is a massive success, and more than I had hoped for.

So, I'm still missing the March 01 results. If anyone has any of the ESM mags from that era, LMK. I'm gonna ask Kicker if they have the results anywhere else, and if that fails, I'll contact all the ESM-members one by one. Can't leave it hanging. In the meantime, I'll see if I can find all the votes from last season to add to the total. Hopefully in a couple more days I'll be able to post the final version.

 

I have a feeling it might not be useful if I followed anywhere near correctly, because
a) The complete results might not be inside
and even
b) Should we be looking at April 2001 magazine if it's the March 2001 selections we need?

But if this magazine would actually be useful then maybe spending £8 might be deemed justified to complete the project Arriaga (Like I actually bought a copy of France Football when I knew I could see the votes for Player of the Century inside)?
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Football-...lermo-Cameroon-Club-Brugge-Totti/201973746535

 

Yeah, the problem would be finding the correct issue. WS had the Mar 01 "results" (winners only) in like the June issue, so it's a shot in the dark. Even if the issue was correct, there might be a bug, like Kicker had.

BTW, is there a WS issue out yet that has all the results for the 2016-2017 season? Would like to add that one, too, but the stupid website only has the results until March.

 

Hah, I was just coming in to announce the completion of my project. I did the last season manually, but as long as everything's done! Yes, even the elusive Mar 01 is there. The problem was in the scan, so they sent me a new one. Gotta hand it to Kicker, they really went out of their way to help me out (compared to some other distinguished publications who never responded). Now everyone can throw those obsolete team of the months away!

 

Just to chime in on this a bit late I know but while I do not have access to Kicker's online archive I know that fellow Bigsoccer poster Raute has, so in case anything is needed he's the man to contact.

 

Great work, and it's really interesting to see the totals and discover for example Kaka had 19 selections for his 2 inclusions in 03/04, or Sousa managed 7 selections in 95/96 while included once.

Teams of the Season by publication might be interesting to see, but that'd possibly take even more work so I'm not requesting it as such!

Months where a player gets included by every publication might be interesting to know about, as well as perhaps occasions where a player makes the Team of the Month with only around 2 picks (I guess that happens occasionally).

Anyway, I guess mostly where players make a Team of the Season on monthly inclusions but wouldn't on total selections, it could often point to a purple patch in form/fame.

To overlap with another post, do these totals say Hazard should've been in the Team of the Season this time instead of Dybala (maybe I mis-remembered or maybe the ESM people mis-counted?). On the same topic I guess they picked a 4-2-4 (or 4-2-3-1) template this time so although Hazard would fit that as 'attacker' maybe somehow him being considered midfielder would mean Dybala got in anyway?

 

Very good and interesting work. Did the voter pool each month stay the same?

Inclined to think certain matches had occasionally a big weight