Johannesburg – Daniele De Rossi, Nemanja Vidic and Francesco Totti are the most attractive retired ex-football players, a new study has found.
The research, conducted by Ticketgum, the online marketplace for sports tickets, analysed the physical attributes, status and social media opinions of each former player, to create a final score out of 10.
“Football players work hard to stay in top shape throughout their careers and it's no wonder that even after retiring, many of them are still admired by people,” the researchers said.
And they found that Daniele De Rossi ranked as the hottest, with a final score of 8.57. The Roma midfielder scored highly in the golden ratio percentage (84.85%) and number of sexy tweets.
“Its golden ratio of 84.85% is the second highest recorded in the study. In addition, with his 1.84 centimetres of height and one of the highest percentages of tweets that define him sexy (8.33%), give a solid score to the Italian,” the researchers explained.
Former Manchester United defender Nemanja Vidic ranked in second place, with a score of 7.80 out of 10.
“Vidic ranks sixth for golden ratio percentages (80.70%) and seventh for height (1.9m), all attributes which count towards his impressive final score,” the TicketGum researchers said.
In third place as the sexiest retired footballer ever is the former and forever Captain of Roma Francesco Totti, with a score of 7.71 out of 10. It ranks third with a golden ratio of 78.61% and a sexy tweet rate of 7.44%.
Meanwhile, despite his $450 million net worth and global presence, fan favourite David Beckham only ranked sixth overall, sitting just behind his former Manchester United team mate Roy Keane who was ranked as the fifth most attractive retired footballer.
“One of the most successful Irish players of all time, Keane scored a high percentage match to the golden ratio (81.49%), and a high 6,23% of tweets calling him sexy contributed to his position as the fifth sexiest retired footballer of all time,” the researchers said.
Ahead of Keane was Welsh superstar Gareth Bale who ranked in fourth place, with a score of 7.42 out of 10.
“The most recent retiree in the data, Bale’s high position is due primarily to his high percentage match to the golden ratio (76.83%) and a 5,64% sexy tweets.”
Rounding off the top 10 was Argentine footballer Pablo Zabaleta, followed by Liverpool’s Martin Skrtel, Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney and German footballer Mario Gomez.
In order to compile the research, Ticketgum performed a multivariate study to identify the sexiest retired footballer.
The research utilised social media analytics consisting of over 3.61 million tweets, anthropometric analysis using computer vision algorithms to compute the geometric golden ratio proximity for each footballer, and other analyses on physical attributes and wealth.
In order to put the study together, TicketGum seeded a list of notable retired footballers and gathered over 3.61 million tweets dating from 2017 onwards which were scraped for each player.
The tweets were required to contain either the official Twitter handle or the name of each footballer.
The tweets were then analysed to identify any containing words, as well as emojis, synonymous with sexy.
This dataset was aggregated to compute the percentage of all tweets containing sexual references as well as the average number of likes for those tweets, for each player.
Images were gathered for each footballer, to conduct a geometric golden ratio analysis on visual and proximal balance of their faces, with a better balance being considered as “more attractive”.
Meanwhile, differences in expressions, illuminations, poses, and lighting were all accounted for, and a standardised sample of three images per person were considered. These images are all front facing, with a regular smile or neutral expression.'
In addition, an estimated net worth and height were obtained for each player from online sources. The strength of each player was obtained from Fifa Career Mode stats, whichever game they were in most recently. This gave an indication of their overall physical strength.
The social media analytics along with golden ratio approximations and additional statistics such as height, net worth and strength were also used to create an index score out of 10.