The players - age and experience

In my previous post I talked about the clubs players have come from, and the squads they're in. Here's a bit of personal stuff about the players themselves. How many caps they have, how old they are, who's got birthdays during the tournament, what rude words their names are anagrams of. The usual questions.

The most capped player is Iker Casillas, the Spanish goalkeeper. He has 129 caps, not bad for a 31 year old. In his day job, he plays for Real Madrid. If he gets hurt, they've got Barca keeper Valdez waiting in the wings with Liverpool's Pepe Reina. Not a bad choice, really. Who have we got again?

Second to Casillas comes Anders Svensen on 126 caps, then good old Shay Given on 121. Shay Given is an anagram of veiny gash, which tells us nothing. Ryan Giggs is an anagram of saggy ring, for that matter. With virtually every word in the English language having been co-opted into the world of double entendres, the odds on anyone's name having a vaguely suggestive anagram must be high.

 So it must be worth your time making some up. In the comments, please.

Moving on. 12 players in all have over 100 caps. None of them are English. England's most capped player is Ashley Cole, on 93.

10 players have no caps at all, including Jack Butland and Kaspar Schmeichel. 117 players have less than 10 caps, including 8 from England. The tournament average is 30.3 caps. England's average is 25.8.

The most experienced team are Spain, with 42.8 caps each, the least are Poland, with 20.2. This bodes well for Spain, less well for the Poles. On the other hand, you do start to wonder what happens to Spain when the golden generation retire.

After sending Walcott to the 2006 World Cup, Arsenal and England nearly provide the youngest player in the tournament again, with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, all of 18 years and 9 months old. This time though the honours go to Holland, with Jetro Willems of PSV, who’s seven months younger. Jetro’s family come from the Dutch Antilles, which used to be their equivalent of Gibraltar, inasmuch as hardly anyone knew how they came by them, but everyone was certain they couldn’t manage without them now. Then they got their independence, and it all turned out perfectly well. Just saying.

We’re almost guaranteed to see more of Willems and Oxlade-Chamberlain than we did of Walcott back then. You may remember he was dragged along by Sven before any of us had really heard of him. In the end he never got on the pitch, even when Owen limped away after viciously tackling himself, then Rooney was sent off for backheeling someone in the balls. It hardly seemed worth giving him the time off school.

The oldest player, Kostas Chalkias of PAOK and Greece, is two months shy of twenty years older. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he’s a goalkeeper. Four out of the oldest ten players are goalkeepers. Whereas the average tournament player is 27 years and 177 days old, the average goalkeeper is 406 days older.

22 players have a birthday during the tournament. Kamil Grosicki of Poland will be 24 on the day of their first game, the tournament opener against Greece. Should Greece top the group, Kastos Katsouranis would get a quarter final on his 33rd birthday. Frank Lampard will be 34 the day after England’s last group game, so let’s all hope he isn’t celebrating it on a plane (I wrote several days ago, when it might have mattered where the hell Frank Lampard was flying to). 4 players could get birthday semifinals, most plausibly Samir Nasri on his 25th.

No-one gets a final on their birthday, except my mate Toby, who probably won’t be playing. Unless they need a band.

So there's all your stats. Bring on the football.

Club and country

Every time one of these football festivals come along I do what comes naturally, and make a spreadsheet. Actually, two spreadsheets. One to track fixtures, groups and tables, the other to look at the squads.

A futile pursuit, you might think, what with perfectly good equivalents existing online, and as far as the first spreadsheet is concerned I really have no defence. With the squads, though, there is a kind of justification for the behaviour, which is that I can then analyse the data I've acquired.

So here are some of the things I've learnt. Or made up, if you prefer. The figures are all correct, give or take the vagaries of Wikipedia and the odd injury (I've had to seriously edit several squads, notably England's), but the interpretation is another matter. The devil is in the detail, which must be why I like details.

Galacticos

It's a top teams' tournament, the Euros (WARNING: other sentences may not alliterate). Out of the 368 players in 23 squads, 71 play for clubs who won their domestic trophy this year.

And all the big leagues are in there. Yes, there's a smattering from the Balkans and the Low Countries, plus Anders Svensson from the not entirely terrifying Elfsborg, but you can guess which champions are most strongly represented. Real Madrid, Manchester City, Borussia Dortmund, Juventus. The winners of the top four European leagues. And that doesn't include either Champions League finalist, or for that matter Barcelona or Man Utd.

The national distribution of clubs is also revealing. English clubs employ 79 players (the verb seems to fit), more than any other nation. Of the English clubs, Chelsea have the most names on the list, with 9 players from 6 countries, while Arsenal send 8 from 7. The Manchester club manage 15 players between them, City just pipping United (again) with 8 against 7. Liverpool, surprisingly perhaps, send as many as United.

Or so I typed when I was drafting this a few days ago. Since then, though, Lampard and Cahill have limped off into the sunset, replaced by some Liverpool squad fillers whose names I forget, and now Liverpool have the highest representation of all the English clubs, with 9 players, 6 in the England squad, and Chelsea are down to 7. Ashley Cole and John Terry are the only English Chelsea players left.

I'm being unfair to Martin Kelly and Jordan Henderson, just like Gary Lineker on Twitter, and I can only clarify with the same speed as he did, and the same mournful complaint. They're perfectly good players, but why no Ferdinand? Well, we all know why, but between Terry's mouth and his dick some of us are beginning to wonder how many tournaments in a row he's going to be allowed to ruin. Lineker didn't say that, but I wonder if he's thinking it?

Well, I did say there would be some interpretation, and I may well find myself interpreting John Terry at regular intervals throughout this tournament. For now, though, let's look at something less unsavoury.

Lesser lights

Most of the English teams represented are in the Premiership, but the Championship get a look in, with 10 players on their way. It’s a good thing Ireland qualified, or there'd only be 3. Ward, Doyle and Hunt are still officially on the Wolves books for now, while Leicester, Derby, Hull and Millwall have laid on the others. Mysteriously, everyone seems to have decided they could do without Bristol City players, even Ireland. I thought it might have been worth checking if Cole Skuse's granny had ever been to Cork for a coddle, but apparently not.

Before we start taking the piss out of Irish food and football too much, we should remember that England have dipped into the Championship pie as well, pulling out an unfamiliar plum in the form of Birmingham City's Jack Butland. A fine prospect, obviously, but what does it tell us about England that our third best goalkeeper has spent half  the season on loan to Cheltenham? To be fair, he was shortlisted for the League Two November Player of the Month trophy. I don't think any of the other squads have anyone who can claim that.

Can you guess the other notable name from the Championship? It's Kasper Schmeichel, of Leicester and Denmark. Now that Lampard's out, are there any other sons of famous footballing fathers going? I think we should be told, which is my way of saying I think you should look it up.

And finally, abroad

That was a lot about ten Championship players. You can expect that from a Bristol City fan, but the Premiership have 69 players at Euro 2012. That's an average of over 4 per squad, spread across 14 countries out of the 16 competing. Unless Szczesny breaks a leg or Greece play Ukraine in the later stages, every game will have at least the possibility of Premiership involvement.

Which hides another, more interesting story. Chelsea Liverpool are the most represented Premiership side, but three European teams do better. Bayern Munich have 12 players there, Real Madrid 11 and Dynamo Kyiv (or Kiev) 10.

Compared with the Premiership sides, a much larger proportion of those players come from the same country as the team. 5 Spaniards from Real, 8 Germans from Bayern and a whopping 9 out of 10 Ukrainians at Kiev. Only Ognjen Vukojević has to leave the country for Croatia's group games in Poland.

Spain also have 7 from Barcelona. They could virtually call themselves Real Barcadrid. There's only 1 striker available to them, Ronaldo and Messi having other loyalties, but they'll be providing Spain's keeper, defence and midfield as usual. 7 from Barca plus 5 from Real makes 12 from another planet.

It's a similar story for Germany. 12 from Bayern or Dortmund, and all of them domestic champions or Champions League finalists. They also provide the core of the defence and midfield, holding the line and putting it through to the showoff expats up front.

All set for July 1? Germany v Spain? It hardly seems worth playing the games. Now get on with playing the fucking games.

Home comfort

It's the homogeneity in their squads that's made such a difference for Spain and Germany in recent years, and it must surely be Ukraine's best hope as well. The Kiev 9 get 5 from Ukrainian champions Shakhtar Donetsk, and 21 out of 23 play in the Ukrainian league. The whole English squad plays in England, but no more than 6 from any team, and that's Liverpool. They know each other, and half the other squads, but they haven’t played together as much.

Poland have none of the unity of the Ukrainian squad. Only 5 of them play in Poland, and no team has more than 3 Polish players there. You could look at this two ways. On the one hand, Poland has more players who can fight their way into one of Europe's more prestigious teams. On the other, they’re much less familiar to each other.

My guess is Ukraine will be the better of the two hosts. Kyiv and Shakhtar are both good teams with strong recent records, and any team built from them is likely to be competitive. I had a look at Mark Lawrenson's pick for the Polish starting XI (Poland team profile), and there's a solid spine from Arsenal and Borussia Dortmund (including keeper Szczesny), but not much else.


So there's my spreadsheet fuelled analysis, and it's nothing you wouldn't have expected. The best players from the best clubs, haute cuisine with a bit of Lidl pate thrown in, John Terry's a twat, Ukraine to go further than Poland, Germany v Spain final. Nothing especially controversial really.

Of course now Spain and Germany are bound to go out early, closely followed by Ukraine. Poland will go from strength to strength, finally beating Ireland in front of 65,00 baffled Ukrainians to lift the trophy, presented to them by the Nigerian child that John Terry saved from drowning. Just remember where you read it first.

Technical addendum

You can make your own spreadsheet if you like. Just go to Wikipedia (Euro 2012 Squads), and copy and paste each team into the spreadsheet package of your choice. You have to do some jiggery pokery to get the data into the formats you need, which can be tiresome. Who am I kidding, that's quite obviously the very best bit. But then, you're the one per cent that didn't skip this bit, so you already knew that.

HINT: the age and date of birth data come inconveniently joined in the same cell. Make some blank columns, and use LEFT, RIGHT, TRIM and general date functions to separate it out. Then copy the results, paste them as values and reapply date format to the resulting integers. Or you could edit 368 cells manually, but where's the fun in that?

I will also send you mine if you like, as a CSV file. Follow me on Twitter, ask me to follow you, then DM me with your email address.