Science and data change the definition of old age in football

The exact point of the threshold has always been disputed. At Manchester United, for example, the 30-year mark has always seemed like a natural boundary. When players reached their 30s, Alex Ferguson, the club’s manager at the time, tended to give them an extra day of rest after matches, in the hope that the extra time off would help with recovery, at a time when fitness begins. to go into decline.

Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger was more nuanced. He had a formula. When midfielders and forwards reached the age of 32, he offered them contract extensions of a maximum of one year. “That’s the rule here,” the coach once declared. “After 32, the basis for renewal is year by year.” He made exceptions for area defenders; in their case, it was acceptable to sign contracts that extended to age 34.

But while the exact cut-off date has always been subjective, the broad and enduring consensus in football is that it’s more or less there. When players pass the age of 30, they cross the border that separates summer from autumn, the present from the past. And once they do, they are officially considered old.

This design has always guided the strategies of recruiting and retaining players from clubs across Europe. The vast majority of clubs generally adhere to a simple principle: buy young players and sell old players.

Tottenham’s acquisition of Croatian midfielder Ivan Perisic, 33, last month, for example, was the first time the club had acquired a winger aged over 30 to its squad since 2017. Liverpool do not. since 2016. Manchester City have not signed players over the age of 30 for over a decade. Goalkeepers, seen by almost everyone as the longest-lived, are the only players who benefit from an exception.

In general, players who are reaching the end of their careers are seen as a burden that the club needs to get rid of. The early European signing window serves as an example of this: Bayern Munich have alienated Robert Lewandowski, who is approaching 34, by trying (unsuccessfully) to sign Erling Haaland, a decade younger, as his successor.

Liverpool, meanwhile, have begun work on dismantling their much-lauded attacking trident, replacing Sadio Mané, 30, with Luis Díaz, 25, and taking Darwin Nuñez, 23, as the future successor to Roberto Firmino, who reaches 31. in October. In their effort to reorganize the squad, Manchester United released several experienced players – including Nemanja Matic, 33, Juan Mata, 34, and Edinson Cavani, 35.

The reasoning behind this is clearly very objective. “The demands of sport are changing,” said Robin Thorpe, a performance scientist who worked for Manchester United for a decade. He now works for Red Bull’s club network. “There’s a lot more emphasis on high-speed racing, acceleration and deceleration.” Younger players are seen as better equipped to handle these demands than older players.

Equally important, however, is that recruiting younger players promises “a greater return on investment when the club later wants to transfer them”, according to Tony Strudwick, Thorpe’s former United colleague and former Arsenal adviser. Clubs are now able to recoup the money they put in – and maybe even make a profit – when they acquire a player in their early 20s. Athletes about a decade older are seen as rapidly depreciating assets in purely economic terms.

These two ideas are, of course, related, and so it is significant that at least one of them is based on a logic that has lost its validity.

According to data from consultancy Twenty First Group, players over 32 have been playing more minutes in the Champions League each year, consistently. Last season, players over the age of 34 – practically macrobes according to traditional football thinking – accounted for more minutes on the pitch in Europe’s top five leagues than in any previous season for which data is available.

Most importantly, this happened without significant cost in terms of performance.

“Age has its pros and cons,” Dani Alves, 39, a former Barcelona right-back and determined to continue his career, told The Guardian this month. “Today I have an experience I didn’t have 20 years ago. When a big game arrives, 20-year-olds are nervous and worried. Not me.”

Twenty First Group data confirms Alves’ assessment. While players in their 20s put more pressure on opponents than their counterparts in their 30s – an average of 14.5 times per game, compared to 12.8 – this disparity is compensated in other ways.

In both the Champions League and the major European national championships, older players win more aerial battles, complete more dribbles, pass more accurately – in the case of midfielders – and score more goals. The number of players over 30 who are part of the Twenty First Group’s Top 150 Players on the Planet model is more than twice as high now as it was a decade ago.

The data very clearly indicate that a 30-year-old player is no longer as old as in the past.

From a sports science perspective, this is hardly surprising. The idea that the 30s mark is an immutable threshold of aging came before football developed its interest in fitness. The current generation of players in their 30s, Strudwick points out, may be the first “to have been exposed to the benefits of cutting-edge sports science early on in their careers”.

There is no reason to assume that they will age at the same rate, or from the same time, as their predecessors. “Look at the physical condition players maintain when they retire,” Strudwick said. “They don’t neglect their bodies. Maybe they need to push them a little less in pre-season, and their recovery may take longer, but from a physical and performance point of view there’s no reason why they can’t add value to their teams until the late 30s.”

That longevity will only increase, Thorpe said, with advances in nutrition and recovery techniques.

When he worked at Manchester United, the rule of thumb was to always give players over 30 an extra day of rest after games. “That seemed like the right thing to do, intuitively.” But the reality is that it wasn’t always the older players who needed a break.

“When we looked into it, when we studied the data, we found that it was an individual issue. Some of the older players were able to train, while some of the younger players needed extra rest,” said Thorpe.

And as these findings gained traction in the sport, he argues, the resulting conclusion was that “more players would have the ability to do more later in their careers.”

Luka Modric was perhaps joking when he told an interviewer ahead of the Champions League final in May that he intended to play “until I’m 50, like that Japanese guy, [Kazuyoshi] Miura.” But this is no longer as absurd as it might once have seemed.

That clubs don’t seem to have noticed – and continue to view 30-year-olds more as a burden than an advantage – is now almost exclusively an economic issue, in Strudwick’s interpretation. “A player’s life cycle is shaped like an inverted U, but salary expectations are linear,” he said.

The more scientific approach may have smoothed the downward curve in a player’s performance graph or delayed its start, but there’s no way to eliminate it for good. At some point, the player will enter what Strudwick defines as a “decline phase”.

And the one thing no club wants – and no club can afford – is to pay a player a top-notch salary when that moment comes. What motivates clubs to continue to believe that 30 is the cut-off date is not what players are able to contribute, but the cost of that contribution.