Nehad Makhadmeh’s research into women’s football has taken me back to look at chronological age and place in birth year discussions in football.
I am tracking the performance of three Premier League teams this season and so I thought I might take a snapshot of birth year in Round 1 games played by Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City.
I am using data compiled by worldfootball.net. This site allocates a notional 90 minutes for a whole game irrespective of additional time played in the first and second halves of games.
There are data for 41 players in these three teams in Round 1.
Minutes Played By Birth Year
The 1985 cohort is: Fernandinho, Debuchy, Koscieny, Kolarov, Navas and Cahill. 1988: Aguero, Matic, Willian, Costa, Ozil, and Sanchez. 1991: Hazard, Mangala, Coquelin, and Oscar.
The quartile of birth year for these players is:
Visualised:
The 1980 cohort has two players born in December, John Terry and Martin Demichelis. The youngest birth year cohort, 1994, has two players born in the fourth quartile too: Kurt Zouma and Raheem Sterling. Raheem was born in December.
The 1986 cohort has the most players from the first quartile of the year: Silva, Falcao and Monreal. Gary Cahill is in the 1985 cohort but was born in December.
In contrast to data for players in the 2014 World Cup (Whitney, 2014), there were many more December birth dates (8) compared to January (2) in week one of the 2015-2016 Premier League season. Players with December birth dates in addition to those mentioned above are: Cazorla, Sanchez, Bony, and Ramsey.
I hope to return to these data as the Premier season progresses.
Photo Credit
Arsenal Members’ Day 2015 (joshjdss, CC BY 2.0)
