Which projected XIs walk in already playing together?

What this is — and isn't

Squad cohesion is a descriptive surface. It captures how much of the projected XI plays together at club level — summed shared minutes for each of the C(11, 2) = 55 pairs, with a join key of (season_end_year, club). Two players who shared a club in different seasons do not count.

This is not a model probability. It does not feed the published tournament-winner numbers. A high cohesion score does not predict a better team — Spain 2022 had an XI heavy in FC Barcelona players and exited early; the descriptive number doesn't close the gap with national-team familiarity, set-piece routines, or manager continuity (which would need lineup-history data we don't have). The number is published for editorial / research use.

The metric inherits the FBref / Understat coverage tilt documented across the rest of the data pipeline: Big-5 leagues are well-covered, while small-league players appear in the ratings table only when they hit Wikipedia top-scorer thresholds. The “low coverage” section above isolates teams where the headline pairwise number is suppressed by missing data rather than by genuine fragmentation.