Avoiding the Drop

From Left: Adebayor, Bendtner, and van Persie warm up for a game

Manchester United will probably win the title tomorrow morning before most of us are even out of bed, in a game that will only be seen on Setanta against Arsenal. And, like every time Arsenal gets thrown out there, the audience will be reminded that the relative youth of their team compared to the team they’re facing is a lot younger.

I actually like Arsene Wenger’s youth policy and a lot of what he has to say about youth development and talent growth. When it comes time to play the games, though, theory sometimes goes out the window. So I wondered: How much younger than Manchester United is Arsenal?

The first thing I looked at was average squad age. ManU’s average age: 24.65 years. Arsenal’s: 23.10 years. For all the emphasis on youth and development, I’d anticipated a much lower Arsenal age and a much higher United age.

In thinking about my method, though, I realized that those are numbers for the entire squad. For Arsenal, that includes veterans like Tomas Rosicky (who hasn’t played all season), whereas it includes youngsters like Fábio (who’s only played in cup games, and has yet to play in the league) for Manchester United. I filtered out any player that hadn’t made any appearances this season and re-calculated; Arsenal’s average age doesn’t change much when that happens (it becomes 23.07), but Manchester United jumps up almost a full year (25.58). So United HAS youth on their team, they just don’t play them.

This didn’t really tell me what I wanted to know, though. I’m interested in finding out what the average age of the players who will actually be on the field on Saturday morning will be. Since I don’t have the line-up, the easiest way to figure this out was to look at the last two games for each team and average the ages of all the players who actually played in either match. Players who played in both matches only figured into the average once, because I couldn’t decide whether to include them twice or not, and ultimately didn’t think it was relevant. I included subs, but didn’t include bench players who didn’t get on the field. Under that method, Arsenal’s average age finally dropped (down to 22.63 years), while Manchester United’s age again rose, again by an entire year (to 26.81 years).

Years don’t always equate with experience, however. There are two ways of looking at gauging experience. The first is actual appearances; on average, how many often did the players on the field for those two games play over the course of the season? For Manchested United, the players they played on the pitch over the last two games had an average of 25.75 appearances in the league alone. For Arsenal, a younger squad with more injuries and more rotation, the players on the pitch had only played in 18 games. That’s almost an eight game swing; no wonder United looks more composed.

Just for fun, I also looked at international appearances (even though I kinda figured how that would turn out before I started). Of that same “played in the last two games” sample group, Manchester United’s players averaged 50.4 caps apiece; Arsenal’s players averaged 23. William Gallas is the most capped current Arsenal player, with 70 caps; there are four United players with more 70 caps.

What does this tell us that we didn’t already know? Not much, really; Arsenal’s young and green, Manchester United is older and more experienced. What it does tell us is that, even though there is youth on the Manchester squad, there’s a huge gulf in experience between the sides that’ll likely be playing tomorrow.