What´s the difference between idxmax() and max() inside a groupby pandas

Question

I have a dataframe with data from many players of different teams. What I wanted was to groupby 'team' and only keep the rows with the max value from height.

When I used this code, I just got the 'Team' label and peoples heights:

Code:

df.groupby(['team'], sort=True)['height'].max()

Output:

team
Argentina 199
Australia 193
Belgium 199 (...)

Then I combined the groupby with loc to get the whole information of the players:

fifa.loc[fifa.groupby('team')['height'].idxmax()]

This printed the whole rows, but I don´t understand why do I use idxmax() and not max() at the end of the code.

Can anyone explain me the difference?

Answer 1

max() simply returns the maximum value.

idmax() returns the index of the (first occurrence of the) maximum value, not the maximum value itself.