Players under 30 with 50 Premier League Appearances

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Originally Posted by samhaydenjr

I was thinking after seeing this and a couple of other posts whether we should re-name this thread and the two similar ones that deal with goalkeepers and forwards from "Embarrassment of riches" to "New Golden Generation?"

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I don't necessarily disagree with a lot of what you're saying Sam. But it's way too early to start calling this a golden generation when - at this point - not a single one of our emerging players has yet nailed down a starting place for a Premier League team or other top European league side (this will hopefully change next season).

To put this into context, John Egan is 29. He turns 30 later this year. Once he does there will not be a single Ireland player under 30 with 50+ EPL appearances. I doubt that's ever happened before.

So, while things are looking up, we're starting from a very low base here. This group, while undoubtedly exciting and with huge potential, are coming into a situation where there's really only about four good senior players there that they can expect to play along side for any significant length of time - Doherty, Egan, Duffy or Hendrick if they can keep their places, maybe Cullen but I don't know if he's any more senior than the young lads, just older. So they're going to have to do this mostly on their own.

I do think the younger group have made a big step forward in the last 6 months after a period where things had seemed to stall a bit for a year or so. There's finally some hope after a few bleak years, and Bazunu and Collins in particular look destined for the top, but it's still way too early to be using the G----- G--------- phrase.

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Originally Posted by Eirambler

I don't necessarily disagree with a lot of what you're saying Sam. But it's way too early to start calling this a golden generation when - at this point - not a single one of our emerging players has yet nailed down a starting place for a Premier League team or other top European league side (this will hopefully change next season).

To put this into context, John Egan is 29. He turns 30 later this year. Once he does there will not be a single Ireland player under 30 with 50+ EPL appearances. I doubt that's ever happened before.

So, while things are looking up, we're starting from a very low base here. This group, while undoubtedly exciting and with huge potential, are coming into a situation where there's really only about four good senior players there that they can expect to play along side for any significant length of time - Doherty, Egan, Duffy or Hendrick if they can keep their places, maybe Cullen but I don't know if he's any more senior than the young lads, just older. So they're going to have to do this mostly on their own.

I do think the younger group have made a big step forward in the last 6 months after a period where things had seemed to stall a bit for a year or so. There's finally some hope after a few bleak years, and Bazunu and Collins in particular look destined for the top, but it's still way too early to be using the G----- G--------- phrase.

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Aaron Connolly has 45 Premier League appearances - https://www.premierleague.com/player...ister/stats?&#! - currently he's the only player under 30 that could reach 50 before Egan turns 30 in October. Callum Robinson is on 48, but is unlikely to get a move to the Premier League this summer.

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Originally Posted by Eirambler

I don't necessarily disagree with a lot of what you're saying Sam. But it's way too early to start calling this a golden generation when - at this point - not a single one of our emerging players has yet nailed down a starting place for a Premier League team or other top European league side (this will hopefully change next season).

To put this into context, John Egan is 29. He turns 30 later this year. Once he does there will not be a single Ireland player under 30 with 50+ EPL appearances. I doubt that's ever happened before.

So, while things are looking up, we're starting from a very low base here. This group, while undoubtedly exciting and with huge potential, are coming into a situation where there's really only about four good senior players there that they can expect to play along side for any significant length of time - Doherty, Egan, Duffy or Hendrick if they can keep their places, maybe Cullen but I don't know if he's any more senior than the young lads, just older. So they're going to have to do this mostly on their own.

I do think the younger group have made a big step forward in the last 6 months after a period where things had seemed to stall a bit for a year or so. There's finally some hope after a few bleak years, and Bazunu and Collins in particular look destined for the top, but it's still way too early to be using the G----- G--------- phrase.

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Been thinking about this for a few days. I did wonder how I could check this out using the Irish Abroad database. It was pretty complicated, and my laptop almost melted down running the numbers, but I do have an answer.

This is the way I worked it out. Take all the Irish players with 50 Premier League appearances, or more. There's 86 altogether* Of those, 71 had 50 appearances, or more, on their 30th birthday.

I have each player's date of birth in the database, so their thirtieth birthday is that day, plus 30 years. On each of those thirtieth birthdays, get the list of players who are aged between 15 and 30 on that day, then get the number of PL appearances for each player on that day, and count how many of those are 50, or greater. The age restriction is to remove checks for players like, say, Omobamidele, no need to check his Premier League games when he was only five!

e.g, Jason McAteer was born on 18th June 1971, so turned 30 on the 18th June 2001, and had appeared in 117 Premier League games on that date. Also on that date, there were 226 players aged between 15 and 30. Of those 226, 17 had 50 PL appearances, or more - Roy Keane(253), Gary Kelly(242), Kenny Cunningham(201), Stephen Carr(164), Ian Harte(127), Gary Breen(116), Lee Carsley(109), Shay Given(105), Rory Delap(103), Richard Dunne(85), Mark Kinsella(70), Willie Boland(63), Andy O'Brien(63), Mark Kennedy(62), Damien Duff(55), Stephen McPhail(52), and Kevin Kilbane(50). It's probably not a coincidence that nine of those were prominent members of the team that qualified for the 2022 World Cup

I repeated this for the other 70 players, and put all this into the graph below. It goes left to right in the order of the 30th birthday of each of 71 players who had 50 PL appearances or more on their 30th, and the number of players under 30 who had appeared in 50 games, or more, on that date.

The peak on the graph about two-thirds of the way across is Daryl Murphy's 30th birthday in March 2013 As you can see, the numbers of players under 30 with 50, or more, Premier League appearances has been in constant decline since then. On that day, there were 17 players under 30 with 50 appearances or more. Jeff Hendrick was 30 last January, which left only one player under 30 with 50 appearances or more, which is John Egan


(click the image for a larger, slightly easier to read, version)
https://i.ibb.co/47K3kFw/Players-Under30.png

* The Premier League stats page - https://www.premierleague.com/stats - lists 84 (change the filters to Appearances, All seasons, and Irish nationality) because Mike Milligan(capped at U21, U23, B, senior levels) and Scott Fitzgerald(capped at U21 and B levels) are listed as English.

That's some serious stats work there in fairness Tets. But the graph tells it's own depressing story. If you take getting to 50 EPL appearances as being an experienced player at that level (and if I'm reading the graph correctly) we've never until the last couple of years had fewer than 10 experienced EPL players aged under 30.

Now we only have one, he's 29, turns 30 in a few months and doesn't even actually play in the Premier League these days either. Even allowing for the ever increasing standard of the Premier League towards wherever kind of worldwide superleague it's becoming and the resultant impact on Irish players, it's still an awful dropoff in terms of our player pool.

It would be interesting to see where we are on that graph in three or five years time, have we recovered most of the damage. By my count there are about 14 Irish players currently under 25 who have played in the league (most with just a small handful of games so far) so hopefully we are about to see something of a turnaround, just unfortunately starting from rock bottom.

Thanks for taking the time to put that together though, really interesting stats.

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Originally Posted by Eirambler

I think the answer is a little from column A and a little from column B. But I'd lean more towards a drop off in standard of players we have produced after the 1992 group as being the main reason[...]But all the same we are going through an incredibly weak period right now due to having produced so few good quality players born between 1993 and 1997.

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Yeah, I think while you can absolutely make the point that, say, Jon Goodman wouldn't be a PL player these days, ultimately the proof of the pudding is in our international results, which have been declining steadily over the past two decades and have been getting actively bad since, what - the 5-1 defeat against Denmark I suppose?

So that points to a clear decline in player ability, even though it may still be the case that we could build a decent international side with, say, a core of 8 Championship players and 3 Premier League regulars.

Still, to not have a single active player with 50+ Premier League appearances (which seems inevitable come October I think?) is pretty alarming all the same.

Tets - when you say there were 226 players aged between 15 and 30 on the day McAteer turned 30, do you mean Irish players of that age in the top four English leagues with a senior appearance? What's that figure at today? You'd imagine that should be fairly static if you assume that the foreign influx into the PL is just pushing our players down a division. But it feels like it's probably a fair bit less.

No, just 226 Irish players aged between 15 and 30. Some of them might not have played in England at all.
Let me get back to you with today's value

<UPDATE>

I only have appearance data for Premier League games before 2006, nothing for Championship, League One, or League Two. It's annoying, but there's not a whole lot that can be done about it.

Let's look at 10 years ago. On Sunday, 1st July 2012, there were 208 players aged between 15 and 30 with one, or more, senior appearances in English league football. That doesn't include players who hadn't played in England at that time, e.g. Aiden McGeady, Barry Maguire, Richie Towell, or Chris Forrester.

There's currently 179 Irish players aged between 15 and 30 with one, or more, senior appearances in English league football. That doesn't include the likes of Jonathan Afolabi(22), Conor Noss(21), Ryan Johansson(21), Conor McCarthy(24), or John Joe Patrick Finn(18)

It's a drop of 29 players, or 13.94%, in ten years.

Spinning this away from the centre half embarassment of riches thread into its own discussion

Thought I would look this up again since it's the end of the season. The news is not good, we still have a grand total of zero players under 30 with 50+ Premier League appearances. The nearest is still Callum Robinson on 48, but obviously he's nowhere near the Premier League these days. Connolly is still second on 45 but Collins pulled level with him yesterday - he'd would have been over 50 by now if he hadn't lost his place for a few months.

The better news is that this does look to be the almost the end of the low point - Collins should get past the 50 mark in the first half of next season, and Obafemi and Ferguson are also within striking distance depending on how next year goes. If O'Shea got a transfer back into the Premier League he would be within range also. Ferguson would need 30 league appearances but you wouldn't put it past him. Bazunu getting relegated is another one in the negative column of course.

So, at least some signs that the line on Tets graph will be pointing in the right direction soon enough.

If you think things are bad for us, spare a thought for our neighbours to the north. They only had one player start a Premier League game all season, he's 35 years old and his team got relegated. Northern Irish players not called Jonny Evans played a total of 68 minutes all season, all off the bench. No player from the north scored or assisted a goal all season.

I did notice that Northern Ireland international Charles Shea made his Man City debut, as a substitute, yesterday

Yes, qualifies for the north through his mother from Newry. Came on at centre back I think. To be fair to them the north have the makings of an OK defence with Bradley and Hume at right back, Charles, McNair and Ballard for centre back and defensive midfield and Lewis at left back. Further up the pitch looks to be a real struggle for them these days though.

Good to see this graph finally starting to turn in the right direction with Collins hitting 50 appearances in the Premier League today. Him being 22 means that it's literally impossible for it to go back to zero for at least seven years. Incredible that we somehow reached that point though, where we had a period of close to a year where we had literally no players in the early or middle parts of their career who could be classed as established Premier League players. You can pretty much draw a parallel between where the numbers dropped into single figures and where our international standing collapsed, around four or five years ago.

Hopefully we'll see it continue to climb now, O'Shea and Ferguson are within striking distance of 50 this season, so is Obafemi but he'd have to get fit and into the Burnley team. Cullen and Bazunu would be two others with the potential to get there in the next couple of years depending on how things go for them.

Given the stats mentioned in the Ogbene thread I thought I'd drag this thread back up to note that Dara O'Shea hit 50 Premier League appearances today, with Evan Ferguson likely to follow in a few weeks, injury permitting. So the graph continues to trend upwards, albeit from about as low a base as it's possible to start from.