April 5, 2022 - RB Leipzig's Joško Gvardiol is the 4th best young footballer under 21 in Europe, while Hajduk's Marin Ljubičić takes 71st place. 

The International Center for Sports Studies (CIES) from Switzerland has published the results of a survey that revealed the 100 best footballers in Europe under 21, excluding goalkeepers.

CIES made this ranking using 15 technical categories, and data for 8 different aspects of the game was obtained from InStat. This study took into account air defense, ground defense, recovery, distribution, take on, chance creation, air attack, and shooting. The strength of the club was also valued, as well as the strength of the league, i.e., the opponent.

The current stopper of the Croatia national team and RB Leipzig, Joško Gvardiol, took an admirable fourth place in the survey as the 'ground blocker playmaker'. Ahead of him are only Bukayo Saka, Mason Greenwodd, and Patrick Wimmer of Arminia Bielefeld.

The three factors that were taken into account when ranking players were their performance in relation to teammates, the results of their club, as well as the quality of opponents. The CIES states that for each of the 100 best young players in Europe, they highlighted two categories of technical skills in which, based on statistics, they are the best out of a total of 11.

Saka is thus marked as a dribbler and creator of chances, while Gvardiol's defense and ball distribution is emphasized, which confirms the epithet of a modern stopper.

Gvardiol played the most minutes for his team out of the 20 best young footballers. Namely, he played 86.8% of all available minutes for Leipzig. In the top 20, according to that criterion, Saka is in second place with 85.3% of minutes played for Arsenal. 

In addition to Gvardiol, another Croatian football player made the list of the 100 best under 21s. Namely, Hajduk striker Marin Ljubičić took 71st place. He played 44% of the available league minutes this season, and CIES pointed out that winning the ball in the air and shooting (‘target man’) as the greatest qualities in his game.

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After finding out four Croats made it to the Champions League final for the first time in history, another interesting statistic turns up: according to the CIES Football Observatory monthly report, Croatia ranks surprisingly high on the world list of expatriate footballers.

The report analysed 137 leagues of 93 national associations worldwide, including all expatriate players present in the first team squads of clubs up to May 1st 2017. Bench players were also included where a list of substitutes was available – in this case, 116 out of 137 leagues. The final sample is made out of 12.051 expatriate footballers playing in 2120 clubs, resulting in an average of 5.7 expatriates per club.

Croatia ranks 8th on the list with 323 expatriate footballers currently present on the field worldwide, 92% of those playing for clubs in UEFA countries. The world leader in exporting football players is Brazil with a total of 1202 expatriates, followed by France (781), Argentina (753), Serbia (460) and England (451); Croatia comes closer to Germany (335) and Spain (362). It's interesting to note the first three countries on the list together make up 22.7% of the total number of expatriate players worldwide, that percentage increasing to 43.5% if we take only the top ten on the list into account.

Seeing that Croatia is by far the smallest out of all listed countries, we can safely call ourselves the number one exporter of football players. That's not really a title to be proud of: as much as it points to the impressive quality of Croatian athletes, it's disappointing to see our greatest players sold to foreign clubs as soon as someone shows interest.

Here's a list of 25 principal exporters:

CIES Football Observatory monthly report, May 2017

Source: Jutarnji

Dinamo Zagreb and Hajduk Split are amongst the 10 largest 'producers' of players to leagues across Europe. Osijek is amongst the top 30.