March 15 – New season new team seems to be the club mantra for playing squads across Europe’s Big 5 leagues, but how successful is this policy in terms of achieving honours and stability? Research by the CIES Football Observatory suggests that changing your team every season will not win you prizes.
CIES ranked the 54 teams who have been ever present in the Big 5 leagues over the past five season by the number of players they have used in domestic league games.
The results were that a proportionally high number of the highest performing teams fielded the fewest players: Bayern Munich (55 players), Paris St-Germain (64), Real Madrid (64), Arsenal (65) and Barcelona (66).
In contrast the teams that fielded the most number of players tended to be the perennial strugglers for survival in their leagues: Genoa (137 players), Granada (129), Sunderland (103), Nice and Stade Rennais (91).
One interesting territory finding was that eight of the eleven teams who fielded more than 100 players in domestic league matches since March 2012 are Italian. Inter Milan, desperate to return to the top of European football, have fielded 98 players in their search for glory.
CIES also examined data for the player who played the most domestic league minutes by club over the five seasons – St-Etienne’s goalkeeper Stephane Ruffler tops the table with 16,650 minutes played.
See the full table at http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2016/180/en/
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