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Premier League football is so relentlessly physical in the modern game that it waits for no passengers, with teams increasingly focussing on youthful exuberance over wily experience.
Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal and Manchester City may all be battling at the head of the Premier League right now, while Sheffield United, Bournemouth and Burnley currently occupy the relegation spots, but is there a correlation between the average age of a line-up in the Premier League and their position in the table?
Well, the boffins at CIES Football Observatory have cleverly crunched the numbers, ranking each of the 20 sides in the Premier League based on their average age, from youngest to oldest.
| Position | Team | Average age |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Burnley | 24.57 yrs |
| 2. | Chelsea | 24.95 |
| 3. | Arsenal | 24.96 |
| 4. | Tottenham Hotspur | 25.12 |
| 5. | Bournemouth | 25.72 |
| 6. | Brentford | 26.22 |
| 7. | Nottingham Forest | 26.53 |
| 8. | Manchester City | 26.55 |
| 9. | Wolves | 26.85 |
| 10. | Sheffield United | 26.85 |
| 11. | Aston Villa | 26.96 |
| 12. | Luton Town | 27.04 |
| 13. | Manchester United | 27.08 |
| 14. | Brighton & Hove Albion | 27.16 |
| 15. | Liverpool | 27.17 |
| 16. | Crystal Palace | 27.52 |
| 17. | Everton | 27.54 |
| 18. | Newcastle United | 27.76 |
| 19. | West Ham United | 28.80 |
| 20. | Fulham | 29.28 |
Clearly, there isn’t any discernible correlation over where a team currently sits in the table and the average age of their lineup.
That’s epitomised by the fact that Burnley, Arsenal and Chelsea – teams that are currently 18th, 2nd and 11th in the Premier League table – have all put out the youngest sides so far this campaign.
That said, however, Arsenal’s young players when compared to Burnley’s are a lot more experienced in Premier League football. Large parts of Vincent Kompany’s squad are in their debut terms in the top flight of English football, while the Arsenal squad, apart from Jurrien Timber, doesn’t feature a single player to have never played in the Premier League before 2023/24.
Indeed, the likes of Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli and William Saliba all bring Arsenal’s average age down, despite their vast experience at the elite level of the game.
Without the 39-year-old Thiago Silva among their ranks, Chelsea could conceivably have comfortably the youngest side in the league. Somehow, Raheem Sterling, 28, is the squad’s next oldest player after Silva.
Meanwhile, Fulham, West Ham and Newcastle are all proving that an older squad doesn’t necessarily equal poor performance. After all, Fulham, in 12th, are the lowest of the three in the Premier League, while the Hammers and Magpies are 7th and 8th, respectively.
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