By Mark Baber
February 16 – As the Premier League goes from strength to strength, attracting the best players from around the world at the peak of their careers, analysis of the ages of football players in Premier League squads by Infostrada highlights the “sad decline in the numbers of young (and particularly English) players in the EPL.”
The Infostrada data takes the age distribution curve of Premier League players, and splits players into three age categories which he describes as: “young players who are building up their experience (‘Talents’), players with a good balance of experience and relative youth (‘Peak Age’) and those whose physical abilities are not what they once were (‘Veterans’).”
Infostrada argues that: “In order to maximise performance, a sports team probably needs to, in general terms, have as many Peak Age players as possible.”
Although this seems to be an untested assumption, it forms the basis of a narrative in which Manchester City in particular (along with Crystal Palace and Stoke City” are described as the “biggest culprits when it comes to not selecting players from the Talents age group,” with City’s starters clearly concentrated on players aged 28 or 29.
According to Infostrada, City now face an issue of how to replace their current stars before too many of them move into the veterans group, which is an argument Arsenal fans remember well from the days Arsene Wenger was urged to break up his famous back line.
The research is picked up in the Guardian newspaper which uses the stats to counter the notion that the Liverpool v Tottenham game – which featured a plethora of young English talent – marks a possible renaissance in the fortunes of the England national team and the birth of a new “Golden Generation.”
Eleven of the 22 starters in the game were under 24, with the average starting age being 24 years 175 days but the Guardian argues that the fall in numbers of starting appearances by young players from around 36% in the 1970s and 80s to 27% in 1991-92 to 17.4% this season “suggests that the resources that clubs have thrown at their academies have not brought more young players through – which has obvious knock-on effects for the England team.”
The Guardian claims that the “pool of young English talent has slowly evaporated.” Given that in the last 20 years “the number of young Englishmen playing fairly regularly in the top flight has halved.”
This compares to opportunities in the European leagues where, for instance, 123 players under 24 are playing regularly in the Eredivisie. Young English players are highly unlikely to ply their trade abroad, which the Guardian attributes to a “time-honoured reluctance” on behalf of English players (or is it more due to foreign selection policies backing their own young players first). The Guardian concludes that whilst Liverpool and Spurs may have brought some youngsters through, others are unlikely to follow.
The counter-narrative to the above is, of course, a recognition that the Premier League is now a globalised league, that the reduction in the number of English players is an inevitable consequence of that globalisation, of the increase in quality of the players and of the increasing strength of the Premier League compared to other European leagues (in particular feeder-leagues like the Eredivisie) – and that the prospects for the England team can only be enhanced by an (albeit smaller) cohort of young players playing in the strongest league in world football.
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1734922452labto1734922452ofdlr1734922452owedi1734922452sni@r1734922452ebab.1734922452kram1734922452