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Friday 3 June 2016

Age Profile of All 24 Euro 2016 Countries.

Here's the proportion of playing time seen by age groups for all 23 qualifiers for Euro 2016 over the period of qualification. France, as hosts did not have to qualify, so their profile is simply taken from their final squad.

Peak age for performance may vary between player or position, but it tends to be from the mid to late 20's.

Averages are often used to describe a squad or team, but these are almost always misleading.

A team can have an average age  of say 26 which is made up almost entirely of peak age players aged 26 years or it could have the same average age, but comprise of near equal numbers of players aged 21 and 31.

These distributions can be expressed numerically, but the visualisation of a plot based on proportion of playing time given to each age group probably best illustrates the career cycle of the current crop of internationals.

The team who have access to the biggest proportion of peak aged players at the 2016 finals is Ukraine.


























3 comments:

  1. Great idea.
    Suggestions:
    - normalized age-x-axis for all teams
    - trend line for more general conclusion
    - histogram/column for age
    - highlighting the peak age are

    ReplyDelete
  2. All excellent points.

    Done in a rush, but may add more detail later,

    Cheers, Mark

    ReplyDelete