Learning Statistics Through Projects

I'm now safely settled into my fourth decade, my 30s, a decade seemingly defined by thinking about if nutmeg would be a good addition to porridge and washing dishes almost adequately. Accompanying me in this decade is the heightened awareness of the degradation of the already battered corpse that I reside in. When I now play football I can't help but excuse every error I make down to my own aged husk. But is it really down to living a lot on this planet? Perhaps I always committed those mistakes (I did). Perhaps I'm better now than I've ever been, with my strengthened care-free mentality - or perhaps that same care-freeness means I'm much less brave on the pitch than I was previously (and back then I was a coward). Is the adolescent correct in loading up football manager, choosing their favourite team and selling every would-be club legend over 29 in the name of progress? Or perhaps the strategy of signing every player over 35 that played for Barcelona 20 years ago ...

Transfer fees in football have often been the subject of derision by the general public due to vast quantities of money clubs are more than willing to spend. However, even those who accept these lofty prices are sometimes puzzled by the price tag of certain players.  Was Harry Maguire really worth £80 million? Neymar, £200 million? How about David Luiz, who throughout his career clubs have forked out over £100 million for?  This project aims to investigate what are the factors that go into the transfer fee of a football player. This is done by taking the statistics of players, for example the amount of clearances per game, goals per game, statistics of that form, and seeing how they relate with the transfer fee. This is what many people do with football in order to justify the cost of  a newly bought unknown player. The first port of call is often to look at their career stats on Wikipedia and mentally work out a goals per game ratio, if the new player was a striker, ...