Age Profiles for A Team's Best and Worst Premiership Seasons.

The optimum age at which players rise to their peak before making the sometimes rapid decline into retirement or punditry is one of the most neglected areas of football analytics. The lack of readily available data is part of the issue, but assessing player development and then their regression is further confounded by the choice of variables.

Shots, goals and assists are obvious key performance indicators for strikers, although even these will have an aspect of team input, but the choice of which data to assess midfielders and defenders, with their diverse team responsibilities, is more problematic.

Some of the game's best defenders rarely made a tackle.

Therefore, using playing time as a percentage of playing time available as a proxy for player worth may still be the best alternative. A player who is not selected by his manager, either because other squad members are regarded as a better option or who misses playing time through injury, should perhaps be  considered as a less valuable asset, either through lack of developed talent or because of age related decline.

This isn't to say that a 30 year old Frank Lampard is inferior to a peak aged midfielder at a lesser club, but generally we might expect that a team that is stocked with youth or near sell by date talent may perform at lower levels than that same team when it operates with more players at their peak.

In these posts, I looked at when players are most likely to dominate playing time in the Premiership and while goal keepers inevitably defy logical appraisal, the peak for strikers would appear to be in their mid twenties, with midfielders and defenders peaking slightly later.

A logical next step is to see if the results achieved by a team is even casually related to having players at their perceived peak denoted by playing time and whether this performance falls away as less mature and aging performers take more of a centre stage.

I looked at teams which had played at least six seasons in the Premiership and collected the amount of playing time allotted to a range of age groups in the most successful season for that club and then their least successful EPL season.

I then combined the age profiles of these Premiership clubs best season as well as their worst season to see if their lack of maturity or aging may have played a role in their peak and trough of performance.

For, example, Arsenal's best performance in the EPL was unsurprisingly their 2003/04 undefeated season, where their points per game tally was over 2.5 standard deviations above the league average for that season, their worst performance so far followed soon afterwards in 2005/06 when they were just 0.75 standard deviations above average, when finishing fourth.

In total I have a group of 22 sides, comparing their best efforts to their worst, profiled by age related playing time.

The plots have been combined in two year intervals to try to make any conclusions more visible. Defenders perhaps excel as much through experience as raw physical attributes. Defending is as much about organisational skills as it is about speed and stamina. Therefore, generally defenders tend to gain proportionally more playing time later in their career, even if they have peaked physically, compared to strikers or midfielders.

A higher proportion of defenders aged from 25 to 28 played in the combined successful seasons, while more raw youth and 30+ defenders appeared when charting the 22 sides nadir.

Midfielders appear to show a similar trend. The physical demands of a midfield position generally results in players in their mid twenties being afforded proportionally more playing time and the peak at 25-26 years appears to show that a successful season by the standards of each of the 22 teams, was on average also marked by a higher proportion of midfielders from that age group.

Thereafter, older aged midfielders account for proportionally more playing time in every age group on the occasions where the sides under performed most from their usual standards.

  

For strikers, again 25-26 year old predominate in successful seasons. They then see proportionally even more playing time in the next two years, possibly as a result of favourable recent impressions. But much of these appearances by strikers in their late twenties also coincide with a season of dramatic under performance by their side, possibly indicating that some strikers can show sudden and precipitous reductions in talent levels as age creeps up on them.

Raw youth and players who retain some ability, but have seen it reduced by aging may be a necessary component of a team's make up at times because of restricted squad sizes and transfer restrictions. Or they may be selected in the belief that they currently possess more helpful ability than they actually do.

Whatever the reasons for the selection of players possibly removed from their peaks, there does seem to be some evidence that these occasions also correspond, on average, with a large degree of under performance by the side over the course of a season.