Football Player Position Recommender System

A player is almost always watched in the position they already play, and judged by that position's criteria. That carries a hidden cost: a centre-back whose attribute profile would actually make him a good defensive midfielder can spend a career labelled "average" as a centre-back.

Searching for these matches by hand isn't practical. With 277 players and 10 positions, evaluating every player through every position's lens means thousands of comparisons - and a scout's time already goes to watching the match.

Scoutium wanted to see these opportunities systematically: not how good a player is, but where else they might be better.

I built a system that analyses player attributes per position and recommends cross-position fits.

1. I derived an attribute signature for each position. The data was segmented by position and I identified which attributes score highly among players considered successful in each role. The result is a profile per position: "being good in this role means being strong on these attributes."
2. Every player was evaluated outside their own position too. A player's 39-attribute profile was compared not against their current position's signature but against the others'. Alongside "how good is this player in their current role" came a second question: "which other role's profile do they fit?"
3. Strong matches are surfaced. Where a player's profile clearly fits the signature of a position they don't play, the system flags it as a recommendation - for example a centre-back whose attributes overlap with the defensive-midfielder profile.
4. The decision stays with the scout. The system doesn't decide transfers or position changes; it lists candidates worth examining. The scout then watches the player with that possibility in mind.

The value of this approach is that it extracts new information from existing data: the same scout scores answer a second question without collecting anything new.

Stack: Python, pandas; position-segmented attribute analysis, profile comparison and cross-position matching.