March 17 – Under 22 players across Europe’s top 31 leagues are getting more playing than time in terms of percentage of minutes played, but the number of home grown U22 players breaking through in their countries of origin is in decline, according to the latest research by the CIES Football Observatory.
Looking at the top 10 list of players born 1995 or later, there are clear signs that these players have established themselves as first choices for their clubs. Five of the top ten are from English Premier League clubs and three of them are from Manchester United.
Two of the five are qualified for England – Man Utd’s Luke Shaw (ranked 2 but on the long term injury list) and Arsenal’s Calum Chambers (7). The chart is topped by France’s Adrien Rabiot at Paris St Germain. Man Utd’s French striker Anthony Martial is ranked 5th. Adnan Januzaj is eighth.
The drop off in minutes played by players born a year or two years later is steep. Spurs Delli Ali and Joe Gomez from Liverpool feature from England in tables that are dominated by Spanish youth.
CIES says that: “Between 1st July 2009 and 31st December 2015, footballers who did not yet celebrate their 22nd birthday played 14.6% of domestic league minutes in 31 top divisions throughout Europe. This percentage varies from 28.7% in Croatia to 6.1% in Cyprus. The highest value at big-5 league level was observed in the German Bundesliga (14.5%). This is almost twice as much as in the English Premier League and the Italian Serie A (7.5%).”
At club level, the highest figures for teams were measured for Lokomotiva Zagreb (54.2%), OFK Belgrade (43.0%) and Feyenoord Rotterdam (39.8%). The record level in the big-5 was registered for Schalke 04 (25.0%), ahead of Toulouse (24.2%) and Bayer Leverkusen (20.7%). The record value in the English Premier League was at Liverpool (14.7%).
The lowest percentage of minutes played by U22 national footballers in clubs were ar AEL Limassol (0.2%), followed by Stoke City and Juventus (both 0.4%). This figure was very low also at Chelsea (0.5%) and Manchester City (1.4%).
View the tables at http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2015/141/en/
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