Squad churn

I found this interesting - of the playing minutes of all our players last season only 38.5% of these were accumulated by players still at the club. This is the second lowest figure in the division with us and Hull having by far the lowest percentages, 10% lower then Sunderland in 3rd bottom.

https://experimental361.com/2017/07/22/an-early-look-at-squad-churn/

Not posting this as a negative or positive comment, it's just an interesting stat and highlights the extent of the rebuilding exercise at hand.

 

Very interesting.

In my opinion there it is not possible to be successful in the medium to long term with such excessive turnover of playing staff. It cannot work and places far too much pressure on the manager.

 

The data was available for the previous season, so I plotted the squad retention % against the final league position. There was no strong correlation:

 

I also graphed the squad retention against the change in league position from the previous season (ignoring promoted/relegated clubs).

Interestingly the 3 biggest improvers all "rolled the dice" and had a low % retention. The 2 biggest losers (Ipswich and Birmingham) suggest that retention does not always equal consolidation and improvement, although their declines do have separate explanations - Ipswich were wholly reliant on Murphy who left, and Birmingham inexplicably sacked Rowett and employed Zola who is utterly useless.

Wednesday and Brighton had the 2 highest retention percentages and made improvements to their respective positions even though they finished highly and didn't have much room to improve. This suggests that if you have a good squad it is definitely worth keeping it together rather than trying to make wholesale changes.

 

I would agree with that.
To be successful the team needs adding to by 2 or 3 players.
Not a full squad.

However - as what has been said 100 times - the directors got caught out.
They couldn't extend players contracts last season because they didn't know if they could hack it in the Championship.

And when they found they could - it was too late - they only had a year left on their contract - so more or less all the team had to be sold.

I'd say it won't happen again - but it could - players being signed now are mostly on 3 year deals.
So in 2 years time all the present team will probably be sold.

 

I think Hecky as said that mate..

 

Careful - you'll get the usual suspects saying he never said that he is wholeheartedly behind the plan.

 

Hopefully the board take on board Hecky comments and look to ensure better retention and better handling of contract negotiations going forward to retain our core.

 

I think you have to set out the data this way, so that its relative and not skewed by budgets.

There looks to be very little correlation at all, which would suggest that keeping the squad together isn't a necessity for improvement. Obviously, it depends on the quality of the squad that you would like to retain (and in our case, this was quite high), but its not as clear cut as some people are making out.

 

We were unsuccessful for years.
We put a plan in place to change that scenario.
it worked.
As a result of that success we were punished by losing a crop of fine players.
The money recouped from that crop of players has given us the flexibility to sign players on longer contracts and to pay larger fees on the replacements than we did on the originals.
As a club we are far better placed now than when the process began.

 

You can remove the word 'strong' from that sentence. There is no correlation.

 

Depends on your definition of medium- to long-term. Mine is 5+ and 10+ years. Both of which would see players kept past their best. Although given the life-expectancy of Championship managers, long-term is probably two seasons.

 

There is a weak correlation between position in the league and % retention with a coefficient of 0.185, or 0.203 if you exclude promoted/relegated teams on the basis that their transfer activity will be skewed by moving to a new division.

 

In our case it was a necessary evil to enable us to shop At the level we are now. It's all about moving forward

 

chapeau for top pedantry. A correlation ~0.2 isn't really a correlation, I don't care what Spearman or Pearson think

 

Good stuff.

 

I would say in modern football short term is six months to a season, medium term a season to a season and a half.