LONDON – The exact location of the threshold has always been a matter of debate. At Manchester United, it lurked close enough to 30 for a time to serve as a natural watershed. Once the players reached their 30s, Alex Ferguson, the club’s manager at the time, granted them an extra day off after a game in hopes the break could calm their creaking bodies.
Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger was a little more nuanced. He had a formula. When the midfielder and striker reached the ripe old age of 32, he was willing to offer them just a one-year contract extension. “That’s the rule here,” he once said. “After 32 it goes from year to year.” He made an exception for centre-backs; they could sign contracts that carried them until the age of 34.
But while the exact cut-off point has always been subjective, the broad and long-standing consensus within football is that it’s in there somewhere. Sometime in their early 30s, players cross the line that separates summer from fall, the present from the past. And once they do, they can officially be considered old.
This demarcation has long influenced both the player recruitment and player retention strategies of teams across Europe. The vast majority of clubs have generally adhered to a simple principle for years: buy youngsters, sell old ones.
Tottenham’s takeover of 33-year-old Croatia midfielder Ivan Perisic last month, for example, was the first time the club had signed an outfield player in his 30s since 2017. Liverpool haven’t done so since 2016. Manchester City haven’t paid a fee for an outfield player over 30 for almost a decade. Goalkeepers, who are generally said to have a longer lifespan, are the only players granted an exception.
Instead, players approaching the twilight of their careers are widely viewed as burdens to be shifted. This summer was a case in point: Bayern Munich managed to alienate almost 34-year-old Robert Lewandowski by trying (unsuccessfully) to appoint Erling Haaland, ten years his junior, as his heir.
Liverpool, meanwhile, have started to break up their vaunted attacking trident, replacing 30-year-old Sadio Mané with 25-year-old Luis Díaz and adding 23-year-old Darwin Nuñez to succeed Roberto Firmino, who turns 31 in October. In a bid to overhaul their squad, Manchester United have released a number of players – including Nemanja Matic, Juan Mata and Edínson Cavani – into a market already saturated with veterans such as Gareth Bale and Ángel Di María.
The reason for this is of course simple. “The demands of the game are changing,” said Robin Thorpe, a performance scientist who spent a decade at Manchester United and now works with Red Bull’s team network. “There’s a lot more emphasis on high-intensity sprinting, accelerating and decelerating.” Younger players are said to be better equipped to handle this load than their elders.
Just as importantly, however, recruiting younger players “promises more return on investment if you want to develop them,” according to Tony Strudwick, a former colleague of Thorpe’s at United who also worked at Arsenal. Clubs can recoup their expenses – maybe even make a profit – on a player acquired in their early 20s. Those that are about a decade older are considered, in a strictly economic sense, to be rapidly depreciating assets.
These two ideas are, of course, related, and so it is significant that at least one of them might be rooted in outdated logic.
According to data from consultancy Twenty First Group, players over the age of 32 are consistently playing more minutes in the Champions League year over year. Last season, players over 34 – practically old by traditional football thinking – spent more minutes in Europe’s big five leagues than in any previous season for which data was available.
More importantly, this has not resulted in a significant cost to their performance.
“Age has its pros and cons,” former Barcelona right-back Dani Alves, now 39 and determined to continue his career, told The Guardian this month. “I have an experience today that I didn’t have 20 years ago. When there’s a big game, 20-year-olds get nervous and worried. I don’t.”
Twenty First Group data confirms Alves. Although players in their 20s press more than those in their 30s – 14.5 presses per 90 minutes versus 12.8 – this reduction is offset in other ways.
In both the Champions League and major European competitions, older players are winning more aerial duels, dribbling more, passing with greater accuracy – if they’re central midfielders – and scoring more goals. More than twice as many players over 30 now rank in the Twenty First Group’s modeling of the top 150 players in the world compared to the same list a decade ago.
The data suggests very strongly that 30 is not as old as it used to be.
From a sports science point of view, this is hardly surprising. The idea of 30 as an unchanging aging threshold predates football’s interest in conditioning: the current generation of players in their 30s, Strudwick says, may be the first to have “been exposed to hard sports science since the beginning of their careers. ”
There is no reason to assume that they would age at the same rate or at the same time as their ancestors. “Look at the state players are in when they retire,” Strudwick said. “They didn’t let go of their bodies. They may need to be pushed a little less early in the season and their recovery may take longer, but from a physical and performance standpoint there’s no reason why they can’t add value until their late 30s.”
That longevity can only be increased through improvements in diet and recovery techniques, Thorpe says.
When he was at Manchester United he said: “The rule of thumb has always been that players over 30 get a second day’s rest after games. It intuitively felt like the right thing to do.” The truth was, though, it wasn’t always the older players who needed the break.
“When we researched it and looked at the data,” Thorpe said, “we realized it was a lot more individual. Some of the older players were able to practice and some of the younger players needed more rest.”
As these kinds of insights become more embedded in esports, he argued, it follows that “more players should be able to do more later in their careers”. Luka Modric may have been joking when he told an interviewer ahead of the Champions League final in May that he intends to “play to 50, like this Japanese [Kazuyoshi] Miura,” but it’s not quite as absurd as it might have once sounded.
From Strudwick’s point of view, the fact that the clubs have apparently not noticed that players over 30 are still seen as a burden rather than a blessing is almost exclusively an economic problem.
“The life cycle of a player is an inverted U shape,” he said. “But salary expectations are linear.”
A more scientific approach might have flattened the downward curve of a player’s performance chart or even delayed its onset, but it can’t eliminate it entirely. At some point, a player enters what Strudwick called the “roll-down phase.” The only thing no club wants – which no club can afford – is to pay a player a premium salary at that moment. It’s what still motivates clubs to believe that a threshold at 30 matters: not what players can contribute, but what it costs.