In my weekly article last week I took a look at something that, within football, is close to my heart. I looked at which teams, from a dataset containing teams from throughout Europe, were performing well with a team that had a lower average age than the majority of their immediate competitors. I like young players, always have, and when scouting I have had to adjust my own biases to not automatically favour young players. Instead, I like to view each player in terms of their ability, performances over at least two seasons and then their suitability to the role that he would have at the club that I work for. Age is a secondary, and important, concern along with other factors including but not limited to value (but how do we calculate value?) contract expiry and the current depth of our squad.
Last week I focussed on some interesting case studies and showed that some teams favour youth for a reason. In the case of the Austrian side Red Bull Salzburg, this fits their identity and marketing as a company while in Slovakia MSK Zilina have turned to youth as a result of their financial situation in the wake of the onset of COVID-19.
This week I thought it would be interesting to flip the narrative on its head and to use the same data set to show which teams are performing well with an older average age. I have to confess that I was surprised to see some of the names that the data showed up as some teams that I tended to associate with the recruitment of young players are trending on the older side of our data set. Interestingly, there seemed to be a parallel between clubs that were successful (or even outright) dominant domestically and playing slightly older players. More on this and why I think this might be later though.
Before I get into the article in full though we need to talk about the data set. All data is from Wyscout and as you will see one of our key metrics is the average age, an easy concept that we dont actually have to go into here in any depth. The second metric that I have used is designed to assess team performance. This is found by simply taking the difference between a teams xG (expected goals) and xGA (expected goals against) the formula is that simple xG-xGA=performance. I find that this gives us the best idea of performance as a whole.
Which clubs are leaders in this group?
Lets start the same way that we did last week with a look at the data set as a whole. The difference this week, however, is that I have not reversed the vertical axis. This means that the teams that I will be using this week as case studies are trending towards the top end of the scale and are positioned in the top-right quadrant.
Now, you can start to see what I mean. The likes of Bayern Munich, Rangers, Internazionale and Crvena Zvezda are all relatively dominant domestically. In the case of Crvena Zvezda, I would have always associated them with having a younger squad and favouring youth players. I think that after reflecting on some of the teams we are seeing here it is clear that success, especially domestically, can lead to stability within the squad and less overall churn. This means that teams are more content to keep players over the medium to long term and in effect, teams are ageing effectively. There does still, of course, come a point where the squad will have to be refreshed and when recruitment of younger players becomes important. I guess that domestic success though will mean that these clubs will have the finances to deal with that when it comes.
Lets pause fo
