Danish players with 450+ minutes in the Big-5 leagues per season, 1995/96 to 2025/26
Danish players with ≥ 450 Big-5 minutes numbered 38 at the 2025/26 peak, 13 at the 1995/96 low and 38 in 2025/26; the change-point fit does not meet the convergence rule, so no step is dated.
How to read it: each line is one country’s count of players with at least 450 minutes in the five biggest leagues, season by season since 1995/96. Danish players are the green line; no season is marked: the change-point fit does not meet the convergence rule; the point past the last season is the forecast for next season with its 90 % interval. Toggle countries and switch to per million to compare fairly across sizes.
Change-point fit: max R-hat 1.003, minimum bulk ESS 2265, minimum tail ESS 2458, 1 divergent transitions; this fails the convergence rule fixed before the refit of 1 October 2026 (R-hat ≤ 1.01, bulk and tail ESS ≥ 400, no divergences), so no step is dated.
How we know
As an analytics question In numbers: Danish players with ≥ 450 minutes in the Big-5 leagues each season since 1995/96, with each step in the level that a change-point model can date.
What we did We counted, season by season, how many home-nation players had real playing time in Europe's five biggest leagues, then asked a change-point model for the most probable seasons of a lasting rise and a lasting fall, with a probability on each.
Sources FBref Big-5 player tables 1995/96 → 2025/26; peers on the same rule. The names are, for each of the three seasons with the highest counts, the Danish players with the most Big-5 minutes that season, goalkeepers included, listed as a record of presence and not as a quality ranking: 2025/26: Victor Nelsson, Morten Frendrup, Joachim Andersen; 2022/23: Kasper Schmeichel, Pierre Højbjerg, Rasmus Nicolaisen; 2024/25: Morten Frendrup, Mikkel Damsgaard, Christian Nørgaard. The dates come from a Bayesian local-level model with two ordered change points, one for the rise and one for the fall (Adams and MacKay, 2007); detail in § Methodology.
What this means
The change-point fit for this series does not meet the convergence rule fixed before the refit of 1 October 2026, even with the stricter step size, so the atlas dates no change in the level. The forecast is the one registered item in the atlas and is scored only when the season’s tables are final.
What this does not show
Players in leagues outside the Big-5 (the top-9 count on the per-head page is wider), when or why the level changed, and any season beyond the one registered forecast.
Data snapshot: FBref tables fetched 14 September 2026, snapshot commit ef7dbd4 · code: src/big5_series.py, src/series_model.py · status: exploratory, not pre-registered · all limitations
