Small squad or big squad: what works best (part 2)

By Tony Attwood

In our previous article on the men’s game we opened with an examination of the argument that having a small squad in the Premier League is not a clever idea since clubs need a lot of players to be able to maintain a high standard, and indeed to have cover in case anyone gets injured.

So it is interesting to look not just at the squad size across the league, but also the number of players actually used.  And while we are at it, the average age of both the squad and the starting XI across the games.  As before our figures come from Transfermarkt.

This table is in the order of the number of players in the first team squad.

 

Club	Squad number	Players used	Average age squad	Average age Starting XI	Lge pos
Manchester United	31	21	25.7	25.9	5
Nottingham Forest	31	23	26.4	25.0	19
AFC Bournemouth	27	22	26.0	25.7	13
Everton FC	27	21	27.0	25.0	16
Leeds United	27	20	24.9	24.7	9
Liverpool FC	27	21	26.7	27.3	7
Newcastle United	27	21	27.3	27.1	11
Aston Villa	26	18	27.1	26.1	17
Leicester City	26	18	27.2	26.7	20
Chelsea FC	25	20	26.5	27.3	6
Fulham FC	25	23	27.5	27.5	10
Tottenham Hotspur	25	19	26.2	27.2	3
Brentford FC	24	21	25.7	25.7	8
Brighton & Hove Albion	24	19	24.9	27.3	4
Crystal Palace	24	18	26.8	27.0	15
Southampton FC	24	23	24.8	23.9	12
West Ham United	24	21	27.7	27.9	18
Arsenal FC	23	19	24.3	24.0	1
Manchester City	23	19	27.2	27.1	2
Wolverhampton Wanderers	23	19	25.3	25.6	14

 

It is interesting that six of the ten of the smallest squad sizes come from clubs currently in the top ten places in the league table.  In other words, having a bigger squad does not generally mean being higher up the league. At least so far this season.

But what about players used?  Do the teams near the top of the league use more or fewer players than those at the bottom?  Here’s the top ten clubs in the league, showing the number of players used so far and the average age of the starting XI, in the last two columns.

Pos	Team	GD	Pts	Players used	av age of starting XI
1	Arsenal	7	15	19	24.0
2	Manchester City	14	14	19	27.1
3	Tottenham Hotspur	7	14	19	27.2
4	Brighton and Hove Albion	6	13	19	24.9
5	Manchester United	0	12	21	25.9
6	Chelsea	-1	10	20	27.3
7	Liverpool	9	9	21	27.3
8	Brentford	6	9	21	25.7
9	Leeds United	0	8	25	24.7
10	Fulham	0	8	27	27.5

 

Here we can see that the clubs at the top are using smaller squads, and as we go down the league we find that clubs that we might not expect to be in the mix by the end of the season, such as Leeds and Fulham are using more players.

However, where Arsenal is really out of sync with the other top clubs is with the average age of its starting XI.  Indeed only Southampton has a younger set of players used so far.

So the argument in the media is that having a small squad in the Premier League is not a clever idea, at least at this early point of this stop-start season, since clubs need a lot of players to be able to maintain a high standard.  They have so far made less noise about the virtues of having an older squad.

And, at least according to the data that we have, they are getting it wrong. 

This leads me to wonder if this isn’t another example of the media twisting reality in order to give themselves more chance to talk about fantasy transfers, which of course cost no money in research or indeed in paying proper journalists to cover the story. 

For it does seem that by refusing to talk about the organisation and standards of refereeing (for example) or the issue of squad ages, costs and size, the media has removed from itself the major topics of debate.  Indeed, if they were also to recognise that smaller squads work better, they would be truly screwed when it comes to having something to write about all the way through the summer and January transfer windows.

And of course, as I noted before, a bigger squad is one of those ideas which at first sounds as if it has an element of logic within it – more players means more cover for anyone who gets injured or loses his form.

However, there is a worrying point here.   We’ve shown over and over that the media will write and talk incessantly about player transfers, not because the transfers will happen, but because it keeps up excitement and no one other than Untold keeps track of the number of stories that turn out to be false. 

And here again, the same thing is happening.   Bigger squads are thought to be good not because they win the league but because big squads allow chit-chat about transfers in the media.

In short, if it is about fantasy transfers it becomes news because that is easy to make up, and easy to convince readers and viewers it is something that matters.  Anything else goes out the window.

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