I discovered that "Carmalo Rago" is actually "Carmelo Rago", and he has a bio on canadasoccer.com. He's like 19 or something. Gomes I'm sure I have because I have everybody, but it's on another computer. It's just Excel, my best buddy. Nationality exists in better form for 2004, you're right (but not for everybody), but going back, good luck. My sense is that there are a heck of a lot more foreign players in the A-League than in MLS. Even percentage wise, given that the A-League is almost twice as large as MLS. I can't remember how many we could have - five visa players? Something like that. But I know there are a bunch of Eastern Europeans in the A-League.
I don't care what it's in kenn, I thought it would be useful to compare your numbers to mine and to see if there was anything that one of us was doing that the other isn't. Everything I've done is in Excel, I didn't learn there were other database programs until a couple of months ago, and I wouldn't have an idea how to use them. This is a difficult thing to analyze, considering the A-league's presence in Canada and Puerto Rico - how should we count these players? Are Americans foreigners in Canada, etc. - like the age situation, there are a lot more extenuating circumstances that make MLS look damned orderly by comparison. Here's the minutes played distributions from 2004 - I divided it according to FIFA regions, but excluded Mexico and Argentina/Brazil because I think they're unique situations, and Canada and Puerto Rico because they have teams in the league (and grouped them with the US in the last group): Code: USA 47.7 CONCACAF 6.0 CONMEBOL 2.2 UEFA 8.4 Africa 3.6 Asia 0.1 Oceania 0.7 Arg. & Brazil 5.5 Mexico 0.9 Canada 22.5 Puerto Rico 2.4 A Lg. Nations 72.6 The US numbers are obviously way lower than MLS (though above the 10/16*72.6= 45.4 that would be expected by team proportions), but those numbers are actually surprisingly close to the 72.7% of minutes played by Americans in MLS last year. These are the ratios and raw numbers of actual players by nationality (who garnered at least 1 minute): Code: USA 174 44.8 CONCACAF 24 6.2 CONMEBOL 9 2.3 UEFA 34 8.8 Africa 18 4.6 Asia 2 0.5 Oceania 3 0.8 Arg. & Brazil 21 5.4 Mexico 2 0.5 Canada 90 23.2 Puerto Rico 11 2.8 The Americans garnered more minutes than would have been expected by their number of players (extending a trend that has been growing in MLS as well), Byron Alvarez and Hugo Alcaraz made Mexico hugely overrepresented, Argentina and Brazil were slightly better represented - all other regions got fewer minutes than should have been expected, with Puerto Rico and Africa being the most significant underachievers.
I show Gomes as 1/1/80, but I show four players as 1/1/80 and I wonder if that's actually true or just a placeholder that means "I don't have his birthdate right now, but he was born in 1980." Anyway, Chris, I emailed you because I'm having trouble getting Excel to calculate ages correctly. It's rounding up, causing a guy born in August of 1979 to be 25 on July 1, 2004, and that's not right. And I can't figure it out short of just going through and manually changing ones that fall between certain dates. Which defeats the purpose of Excel.
Okay, I sorted the age thing by rounding down. I thought I had everybody's DOBs for 2003, but I don't have these guys': Carrasco, Javier (El Paso) Finklea, Timothy (Cincinnati) Narita, Junro (El Paso) Thomas, Keegan (Calgary) Without those guys, I show the median age in 2003 as 23. Is that right? I show 2003's non-minutes-weighted average as 25.40, and the weighted average as 26.02. I show the median age in 2004 as 25. I now show 2004's non-minutes-weighted average as 25.76 and the weighted average as 26.17. Chris, I've emailed you my spreadsheet to compare with yours.
I'm not sure what you're doing here, kenn - I'm using your speadsheet, and get a median of 25 years (more specifically, 25.3 years) - I'm not sure this is indicative of much, however, since the median is heavily skewed by the fact that Cincinatti fielded a dozen or more 22-year old recent graduates when their team mutinied against them. I disagree with rounding ages in this case, kenn - by rounding ages down, you cut about .5 years off the average age (because a player who is 25.9, e.g., is counted as a 25 year old) - I don't see any reason to round to the nearest year, except when counting how many players there are of age x. For these, I got the same thing plus .5 years - median 25.65, non-weighted average 26.26.
I thought the same thing - I think odds are pretty slim that four players, all relatively obscure, had such a conspicuous birthdate - and, considering that there weren't any 1/1/82's or 1/1/79's, I'm worried that that is just the default birthdate, and that the 80 is no more meaningful than the 1 or the 1.
You're right. 25. I divided 472 by 2 and got 286 instead of 236. The median for 2003 is 25. I can see that, I guess. But I was dealing with ages as an absolute. If we're going to start getting into half-ages, it's just as abritrary as picking July 1 for the reference date. A player who's 25 and three days and a player who's 25 and 360 days are both 25. Too many decimals might or might not be too high a level of implied accuracy for the broad generalizations we're trying to make here. I'm not so much concerned with what the numbers are as what the numbers mean. Is the A-League more or less a league of young kids than MLS? Is the league getting older or younger? What are the effects of contraction on the A-League - do older or younger players get forced out? Now that A-League stats are a little more thorough (there've been years where they couldn't tell that something was a typo, and they created a whole new player based on the typo, when it was obvious which player the stats belonged to) we can do a bit more in terms of having a complete record of an A-League season. We can also see which players move in and out of the league, on their way up or their way down the ladder. We can see the effects of MLS expansion and where those guys come from. We can see what happens to MLS draft picks who don't make it. This is good information to have.
(You know, Excel has a median function [i.e. median()]) Here's my problem with your example. If you're measuring from July 1, and have a player who is 25 and three days and a player who is 25 and 360 days, you would measure them as the 25-25=0, the same age. However, if someone else chose to measure (arbitrarily) from August 1, he'd measure them as 26-25=1 year apart. Whereas, if you don't round, they're 357 days apart no matter when you measure from. Although, yeah, we don't need to be measuring ages to the thousandth, I think it's better to calculate using the raw numbers, and only then round, rather than use rounded numbers from the start. Your average age of 25.4 implies, to me, that the average player would be 25 and 3 and a third months - if you're rounding before you do these calculations, this simply isn't true. I agree completely - what's important isn't that the A-league's average age is 24.853, it's that it fell (or rose) .3 years from last year, etc. However, I think it's necessary for all of us to use the same method when measuring these things, and I think (of course) that it's better to use as much information as we have until we actually get down to interpreting the statistics. Well I'm glad I wasn't around for the bad old days. Agree completely with the rest (although I'd be really interested to see anyone draw conclusions from the transfers in/out of the A-league).
Another year, another drop in average age for MLS. This makes four straight years that the league has seen its average (minutes-played) age drop, after four years of relative stability. Furthermore, while ages became more and more spread out each of the first 5 seasons, this trend seems to have tailed off in recent years, perhaps because of competition with ages becoming more compressed around the 22-26 range. Code: Ages st. dev 1996 27.20 3.43 1997 27.44 3.78 1998 27.52 4.10 1999 27.44 4.11 2000 27.48 4.36 2001 27.35 4.57 2002 26.98 4.34 2003 26.72 4.14 2004 26.43 4.28
And I think we know intuitively that the league is getting younger. The first wave of guys in the league may have included a bunch of guys who had been holding on, waiting for a Division I league to get started, along with the inevitable aging foreign players in for a holiday in the States (that's just a guess, I don't have the breakdowns). It seems like we're seeing more and more young Americans now...really young Americans (besides Mr. Adu), which is dropping the average. Good stuff, Chris.
I think I've probably posted this before, but here's a brief look at the difference in ages between American MLS players and foreign MLS players: Code: U.S. Foreign % US 1996 26.50 28.70 0.684 1997 26.74 29.01 0.693 1998 26.70 29.16 0.666 1999 26.64 29.17 0.686 2000 26.69 29.40 0.708 2001 26.63 28.99 0.696 2002 26.46 28.23 0.706 2003 26.11 28.33 0.727 2004 25.97 27.73 0.742 I classified foreign players as anybody who 'developed' (yes, not a very quantitative measure) outside of the U.S. At its peak, the difference between the average age of a US player in MLS and that of a foreigner was 2.70 years; this year, the gap tied the low set in 2002, at 1.76 years. Obviously, it's still true, to some extent, that MLS is a retirement league for overseas players. However, it doesn't seem at all intuitive to me that this will persist - as MLS imports more players from CONCACAF, and the old Euros struggle to hold a spot here (see Powell, Daryl), it seems likely that the gap would at least continue to fall. Does anybody have any numbers on this difference between other leagues (numerista - Mexico?) - are significant gaps between foreigners and domestics commonplace? A lot of the age difference between domestics and foreigners is accounted for by the very oldest players - had Preki played 1800 minutes this year, the drop in foreign ages would have been half, falling from 28.33 to just 28.03. Additionally, simply removing the ten oldest players in the league removes a full year .6 years from the gap (dropping it to 1.16). That's because, while foreigners only account for 28% of MLS players (and only 26% of minutes), 6 of the 10 oldest players (and 7 if you count Robin Fraser [8 with that Swissman Agoos]) are foreign-raised. That looks likely to change soon, however, as Preki, Pareja, and Stewart can't hold out much longer, and recent imports Herzog and Hong are retiring after this season. (Old imports don't seem to be lasting as long as they used to.) Code: [u]The oldest:[/u] Preki Fraser, Robin Onstad, Pat Agoos, Jeff Pareja, Oscar Herzog, Andreas Myung-Bo, Hong Meola, Tony Stewart, Earnie Jones, Cobi
Here are the minutes-weighted ages from Mexico, using age at (roughly) the start of each temporada. Without the weighting, Mexicans appear about a year younger, while the foreigners' ages don't change significantly. My impression is that in Mexico, teams tend to have older domestic players than in most countries. They generally keep large squads, which makes it hard for youngsters to break in. Code: Mex. Foreign 1996-1 26.39 27.61 1996-2 26.60 27.86 1997-1 26.77 28.04 1997-2 27.07 28.11 1998-1 26.84 27.47 1998-2 27.00 27.45 1999-1 26.91 27.16 1999-2 26.97 27.59 2000-1 26.73 27.55 2000-2 27.19 28.20 2001-1 26.89 28.30 2001-2 26.71 28.66 2002-1 26.55 28.83 2002-2 26.63 27.72 2003-1 26.82 27.69 2003-2 26.82 27.89
I would imagine the league will get older next season, as expansion prolongs careers, just as it got younger when contraction forced teams to choose between older players who were a little better right now, but got paid more and were headed downhill, and younger kids with an upside.
In general, I agree with this logic. Players decline more slowly than they improve, so if you're going to extend a player's career, you'd rather take the guy who's a year too old, not a year too young. In addition, it isn't always easy to lure young talent away from college. In this specific case, though, I'm not so confident about what will happen. There are several reasons why the expansion teams might themselves be on the young side... History -- In the 1998 expansion, the Fusion drew heavily upon veterans. The Fire dug up younger players, like Thornton, Brown, Armas, Marsch, Razov, and Wolff. We know how that worked out. Coaches -- With Rongen and Ellinger coming from the youth national teams, they should be closely attuned to talent at that end of the spectrum. As an example, Santino Quaranta will be only 20 years old next season, and he has played for both of these guys. Spanish-speakers -- To the extent that Chivas wants Spanish-speaking players, they'll be forced to rely on youth. Sure, they can have three senior internationals, but top Mexican veterans are none too keen on coming here. Ramón Ramirez is already making noises about backing out. Instead, foreign reinforcements are likely to be up-and-comers -- they've been talking about signing six transitional internationals. In addition, hispanic players in the US tend to be younger, so that could help bring down the age, too.
Interesting points. Some of them make some sense. I personally don't think Rongen has tended to be infautated with youth in the past, and we really don't know about Ellinger until he coaches adults. The Spanish-speaking thing is intriguing. It depends on how much Chivas is willing to risk sucking in their first season. The hiring of Rongen might indicate they think it's more important to get off to a competitive start than to stick too literally to the Spanish language (I personally think they took him ofver a Spanish speaking coach mostly because they needed someone with enough knowledge of the players in this league to get a good expansion draft). But then who knows. swedcrip34, You're right, I forgot about the developmental slots. But remember, we are also talking in terms of weighted by minutes played, so those guys might not play for the first team very much.
He may not be infatuated, but neither did he hesitate to bring Convey and Quaranta along quickly. Overall, his track record in MLS drafts is hit-or-miss. In year one of MLS, Hejduk and Ralston were steals, but in subsequent years, he had some massive washouts like Johnny Torres and Jason Moore. His most recent draft haul -- Lisi, Nelsen, Quaranta, Namoff, and Ziadie in 2001 -- was excellent. I think that's correct, but it doesn't mean they'll abandon the Spanish-speaking philosophy altogether. They're going to look long and hard at the Raúl Palomares and Jesús Ochoa types, to decide who's ready to contribute. In addition, Transitional Internationals could serve both purposes at once. I pulled up a recent squad list for Mexico's Under-20's, and six of its players are from Chivas. Those youngsters would all be options for Rongen, as would Isaac Romo, who played for their 2003 U-20's but is still stuck on the bench in Guadalajara.
This is actually not really true, n. Maybe people will remember it that way, and that will affect how the draft shakes out, but the Fire were actually an older team in 1998 than the Fusion (28.4 to 27.8) - the Fire's veterans - Nowak, Kosecki, Podbrozny, Kubik, Klopas, Okaroh, were all well over thirty and drove the average up significantly. Fire median age was far lower - 25.6 versus 27.5, because of an enormous gap that existed between the vets and the rookies. The 4 players between 25.6 and 31.3 played 908, 159, 11, and 6 minutes. I certainly think that this is a significant difference between the last expansion draft and this one. With the developmental rosters and P-40's, there are going to be a bunch more players in the 21-24 age range that are appealing prospects - considering the # of allocation and discovery players expansion teams will have to fit under salary cap, I think we may see mostly this kind of player taken in the draft. Although I doubt it will affect much of anything next year, the likelihood that most Chivas USA players will join the team without attending college as teenagers could have a long-term effect on driving the age down.
As a point of reference, here are the 1997 and 1998 ages for MLS clubs: Code: Age 1997 1998 Colorado 27.2 26.7 Columbus 27.3 27.8 Dallas 27.2 28.9 D.C. United 27.7 26.7 Kansas City 27.4 28.2 Los Angeles 26.8 26.5 Metrostars 27.1 27.0 New England 27.3 27.2 San Jose 28.6 27.4 Tampa Bay 27.8 27.9 Chicago 28.4 Miami 27.8 Average 27.4 27.5 Expansion 28.1 Non-Expansion 27.4 27.4
Interesting stuff again, Chris, although I don't really think this contradicts my point. The Fire did have some older veterans, but as the median age shows, the Fusion relied on more veterans. (Perhaps this goes back to the ambiguity of the word "veteran.") Since this is the stats forum, I might as well ask: is this a weighted median?
Well, it doesn't really contradict it, but I think it shows that we can't simply call the Fire a 'young team' and the Fusion an 'old team.' I think actually the best division we can draw about the two teams is one of salary allocation - although this is a guess, it looks like the Fire were bulit around a core of high-paid foreign veterans, with talented, but cheap, young American players filling in everywhere else. (I wouldn't be too confident that would work again.) The Fusion, meanwhile, were more diffuse - they had one young, presumably highly paid player in Diego Serna, their draft picks Cullen and Mastroeni and P-40 Carlos Parra played a lot, while pretty much everybody else was an expansion draft/discovery pickup. Yeah, sorry, minutes-weighted median. The non-weighted medians were 26.3 Fusion, 25.6 Fire.
Out of curiosity, I tried to figure out where the various minutes-played for both expansion teams came from. I divided players into 5 ways of acquisition - Expansion Draft, College Draft, Supplemental Draft, Allocation/Discovery, or P-40, and treated players who were acquired with players from one source as being from that source (so Chris Armas and Jorge Campos were "expansion" acquisitions). I wouldn't say that the results came out too meaningfully, both teams look approximately the same, but it took me long enough that I'm gonna post it: Code: Chicago Mimai E 0.42 0.47 C 0.13 0.14 S 0.08 0.00 A 0.35 0.34 P-40 0.02 0.04 Although conditions are radically different this year, I'd expect to see something similar from RSL and Chivas.
Would this really distinguish them from the Fusion, whose foreigners included Serna, Valderrama, and former Argentinian league star Marcelo Herrera? At that point in time, MLS was dominated by foreigners. Nine of the twelve teams were led in scoring by a player who was raised outside the US. The exceptions the Burn (Kreis), the Galaxy (Cobi), and the Fire (Razov).
The chart below illustrates individual players' minutes played and ages. Code: 1542 36.6 2294 34.6 1260 34.7 2790 34.2 1176 34.6 1921 33.7 1441 31.5 1497 32.2 1690 31.3 1999 32.1 2488 31.2 523 32.0 1784 29.6 765 31.5 1187 29.3 1979 31.3 90 28.9 6 30.0 1575 28.8 11 26.8 1263 28.4 159 26.6 212 27.5 908 26.2 524 27.0 2790 25.6 270 26.9 625 25.5 270 26.4 812 25.4 2232 26.2 2076 24.5 310 25.0 2199 24.4 1988 24.5 2091 24.1 1890 24.2 623 23.7 719 23.7 90 23.6 332 23.4 218 23.1 288 22.7 2470 22.8 323 22.5 1973 22.4 390 22.3 137 22.3 2680 22.1 651 21.1 1611 21.6 57 21.5 1317 21.2 90 21.1 360 20.6 On the left is the Fusion. On the right is the Fire. While they were both made up of a good number of foreigners, it looks to me like they're very differently constituted.
I'm not sure averaging is the right thing to do here. That will produce the same result for a pair of 27 yr olds as for a 34 yr old paired with a 20 yr old. Eyeballing the data, I don't see any major difference between the two teams. Maybe it just seems that way because the Fire's young players turned out to be better.