When do soccer players hit their peak part 1
Peaks definition:
A peak is the age at which an athlete loses performance value. I like to breakdown an athlete’s peak into two components based on the fact that I do not believe that they are significantly correlated. The first beak is an ability peak which is conditioned on the athlete playing in the game how much impact do they have on the game. The second peak is the durability peak which measures how many games a player is available to perform at their individual top level. Since athletes compete in physical competition, it is assumed that there is only one peak, but I think this framework provides analytical value add. Knowing and understanding the different types of peaks is essential for any GM making trade decisions because they need to understand what the relevant risk and squad portfolio they want to have. Obviously the statistics I’m building are population level stats, so don’t use it for an individual player when you have more information, but use it as a framework for predicting what might happen.
Ability Peak:
The ability peak for players can be measured in multiple ways, one way to measure it is based on their perceived peak. (Ideally you would measure this with game based performance data, but we do not have access to this data at this point in time for enough seasons to make this analysis). An alternate way to measure ability peak is to ask at what age do scouts starts to think that players start to become worse. Luckily EA sports FIFA ratings could provide some intuition here, as they are collected by a range of scouts and posted on many public sites.
We can see from this chart that most players tend to hit their peak from the ages 24-29. This is interesting because it shows that there are some players who can even peak at the age of 34. These charts differ based on the position of the players, if you would like to see that breakdown feel free to get in touch! However, these ratings are usually based on the previous years performances since they are a scouts opinion, so I would recommend adjusting my estimates by one year, so assuming players hit ability peaks at around 23-28 on average.
Durability Peak:
The durability peak for soccer players is very important to measure as well, and we can measure this by getting a sense of the number of minutes player per age of the player. We can also measure at what age do players appear in the most minutes in their career.
When looking at the data we find that players tend to play the most minutes at around 27, but it is fairly consitent from 25-32 and most players play a similar amount of games. We decided to dig deeper, because we realized that this could be influenced by a survivor bias where older players on average would play a similiar amount of minutes because players who stopped playing would retire. Because we couldn’t control for the universe of players at a given age we decided to look at what age are players playing the most in their career. What we found was actually quite interesting.
What we see here is that most players play the most amount of minutes at the age of 24 in their career, but some players hit their peak players all the way up to 31 or 32.
Controlling for Position:
These models would be better if we controlled for position. If you would like to see the results based on that feel free to get in touch!
Credits:
A lot of credit goes into the work done by Jack Pierson, Joon Young Park, and Hernan Caceres who wrote the initial version of the scrapers and did a lot of exploratory work on this data to get it into this form!