Google matrix analysis of worldwide football mercato

[EN] The worldwide football transfer market is analyzed as a directed complex network: the football clubs are the network nodes and the directed edges are weighted by the total amount of money transferred from a club to another. The Google matrix description allows to treat every club independently of their richness and allows to measure for a given club the efficiency of player sales and player acquisitions. The PageRank algorithm, developed initially for the World Wide Web, naturally characterizes the ability of a club to import players. The CheiRank algorithm, also developed to analyze large scale directed complex networks, characterizes the ability of a club to export players. The analy…