Our friend Patrick Caskie, via his excellent Statskala Substack, introduced me to the work of another analyst as part of Patrick’s analysis on contextualizing Rangers’ summer signings relative to player aging curves. He also cited the work of Michael Caley at his Substack, from which Patrick synthesized the two.
As with nearly everything else I have ever done across domains relative to analysis, I will be stealing these peoples’ ideas…but with credit!
My much ballyhooed “war path” against Scott Brown in 2020 was never really about the former Celtic captain. Rather, it was driven by my dismay to the extent to which I believed Celtic were disregarding the realities of player aging curves, and the mountain of evidence across sports as to why playing Brown in the role being asked of him was flat-earther-levels of dumb.
I encourage readers to visit the links above to observe Caley’s graphic on aging curves, but for central midfielders minutes allocated within the sport unsurprisingly seem to peak between 24 to 26 years old, with very little at all to players aged 36+. As with any distribution, there are always outliers such as Luka Modric, but as Freddie once sang, time waits for no one.
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