You know, sometimes you kick off a project not because it’s deeply needed by the community, but just because you’re absolutely fed up with some random dude’s loud mouth. That’s how this whole Eibar versus Sporting historic XI comparison started.
My cousin, who lives halfway up the Asturias coast, is one of those guys who thinks that because his team had three good attacking midfielders back in 2017, they automatically win every hypothetical comparison forever. We were on a long, rainy drive last month, and he wouldn’t shut up about how the ‘Golden Sporting Alignment’ would walk over any Eibar squad ever assembled. After about four hours of that nonsense, I decided I had to shut him down with actual, verifiable, painful data. Not just opinions. That’s the real reason I dived into this mess.
Sourcing the Ancient History: Digging Through the Digital Dirt
The first hurdle was finding the lineups. These aren’t Real Madrid or Barcelona. We are talking Eibar and Sporting Gijón, and we needed specific starting elevens from specific historic seasons—mostly when both teams were slugging it out in the top division, roughly spanning 2014 to 2019.
I initially tried using the big European data providers, but they usually generalize the squad rating, they don’t give the granular, match-by-match detail for the specific 11 who started in, say, the 2-0 Eibar win in December 2016. The real juice is in the details.
So, I resorted to the trenches. I literally spent three days cross-referencing old regional Spanish newspaper archives—digital versions, thankfully—and obscure fan forums. I built a terrible, cobbled-together spreadsheet just to track which players got the nod in the biggest fixtures where the rivalry really mattered. I focused on the matches played between the two during the 2015-16 and 2016-17 La Liga seasons, as that felt like the peak alignment comparison window.
The output was a long list of names. For each team, I identified what I considered their strongest, most utilized starting 11 during that crucial period. This meant ignoring the fringe players and committing to the core eleven faces that defined their tactical shape.
Defining “Stronger”: Why Data Needs Interpretation
Once I had the names—say, Ramis vs. Meré in defense, or Enrich vs. Cop up front—the real work started: defining ‘stronger.’ It’s easy to say Team A had more goals, but Eibar’s whole game plan was usually a defensive masterclass combined with grinding efficiency. Sporting often relied on individual brilliance.
I couldn’t just calculate market value; that fluctuates too much and doesn’t account for team synergy. I had to create a composite metric. It was a crude scoring system, I admit, designed specifically to settle this cousin argument.
My “Strength Index” was based on three equally weighted categories for the starting XI identified:
- Individual Peak Performance Score (1-10): How highly rated was the player during their best season in that alignment period? I pulled data from aggregated site ratings and normalized it.
- Defensive Solidity vs. Attacking Output: I averaged out the team’s goals scored/conceded ratio across the peak seasons and assigned points based on how much that specific starting player contributed (e.g., clean sheets for defenders, goals for strikers).
- International Presence/Longevity: How many of the starting eleven earned international caps while playing for the club? This measured perceived quality and star power.
I spent the better part of a week just feeding these numbers into a model I built from scratch in Excel. It was messy. I had to go back twice because I realized I misclassified one of Eibar’s defensive midfielders in the 2016 lineup, completely throwing off the defensive index score.
The Conclusion I Was Forced to Accept
After all that manual labor, all the scraping, and all the arguing with myself about whether to weigh a goal scorer more than a world-class center-back, the results finally emerged.
My goal was to prove my cousin wrong, right? That’s why I went through all this effort. But the data doesn’t lie, even when you torture it a little.
The strongest starting XI, based purely on the peak-season alignments of 2016-2017, actually went to Real Sporting, but only by the slimmest of margins—a 3% difference in the overall Strength Index. They achieved this edge thanks almost entirely to a brief, but brilliant, period of high individual ratings for their forward line, which significantly boosted their Attacking Output score. Eibar’s line-up was arguably more consistent and their defense was rated higher overall, but they lacked the necessary high-point individual scorers to pull ahead.
I texted my cousin the 40-page report I had generated. He replied with a single thumbs-up emoji and a message saying, “See? Told ya.”
So what did I really learn from this practice? I learned that winning an argument fueled by pure stubbornness usually requires far more effort than the argument is worth, but damn, it was fun figuring out how to quantify nostalgia using crude metrics. And now I have a perfectly good, if slightly opinionated, database of historic Segunda and La Liga line-ups, ready for the next silly argument someone wants to start up.