February 25 – A study of four top tier Latin American leagues shows the covid pandemic has led to an increase in clubs playing home grown players, a drop in the recruitment of players from overseas and a trend towards a decrease in the average age of players being fielded.
The CIES Football Observatory looked at the demographic profile of players and teams in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Chile.
“The most important changes were recorded in the Argentinean top division, where the percentage of club-trained players has gone up from 22.6% to 34.1% (+11.5%). As a comparison, the percentage of players from clubs’ youth academies among all footballers fielded in domestic league matches is 19.0% in Chile (+1.2%), 18.5% in Brazil (+3.8%) and 13.5% in Mexico (+0.2%),” finds the report.
Looking at individual clubs, the study higlights CA Boca Juniors as “by far the team having trained the greatest number of players present in the four leagues studied: 48, of whom only seven are still at the Buenos Aires club.”
Boca are ahead of Santos FC and CA Lanús who with 38 players, are the second biggest training clubs, followed Chile’s Universidad Católica and the Argentina’s River Plate (37 players trained in both cases).
Click here to see the full report.
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