Trends For Ageing Goalscorers, The Improving Diaz & Darwinian Anti-Dickheads
The second part of Paul Tomkins' chapter from This Red Planet
Another chapter from This Red Planet, the book that this substack takes it name from, and here’s part two for subscribers to read if they haven’t bought the book! In this one Paul moves on from the dickheads and egotists - instead looking at the ageing goalscorers and the new look attack of the Reds’ front line, which is very interesting reading a year from its publication. Plus, don’t forget we’ve also added Gakpo - who Paul has written about extensively as well.
For an article written during the summer of 2021 I decided to look at the previous season’s top scorers across Europe, and the trend for ageing strikers proving evergreen. I’ll reference some of that article here, and update it for 2022, with new observations.
It’s fairly self-evident that explosive wingers are the earliest to ‘melt’, although players like John Barnes (enforced by injury) and Ryan Giggs went on to become ball-hugging central midfielders. Dribbling success tends to peak in the early-to-mid 20s.
Then there’s the ‘miles in the legs’ conundrum, and whether über-fit footballers who play constantly from the age of 17 (such as Gini Wijnaldum) are more or less likely to go on until they are 35 or 36; if they are somehow ultra-durable, or if the constant football takes a toll.
(In the case of James Milner – now MBE – his longevity is obviously helped by starting fewer than ten league games in 2021/22, even though he has made between 35 and 47 appearances in each season throughout his time with the Reds – now most are from the bench.)
Another variable is specific body type: the endomorphic Wayne Rooney looked increasingly washed-up as he approached 30 (which people foresaw many years earlier), whereas the initially injury-prone Giggs’ ectomorphic leanness possibly helped him to go on in the Premier League until he was 40, as did the similarly strong-but-wiry Teddy Sheringham, who was also 40 when West Ham lost to Liverpool in the 2006 FA Cup Final. In 2005, when he signed for Liverpool, I suggested that Peter Crouch could play Premier League football into his late 30s, and he bowed out at 38 in 2019, albeit he quit the game as Burnley were just using him as a 6’7” target (‘a head on a stick’) rather than the all-round footballer he once was.
In 2021, I noted that there were a staggering number of examples of elite goalscoring ratios for strikers in major leagues aged 33-39. (Of course, as noted earlier, the aim is to win games and win trophies, not top-scorer awards, but it’s interesting to look at what helped these players remain prolific.)
Bob Paisley famously said that he let players lose their legs on someone else’s pitch, and he often released stars aged 29 or 30; but times have changed. Equally, Kenny Dalglish was 32 when Paisley retired, and there was no sign of the ‘King’ being sold or phased out (1982/83 turned out to be Kenny’s last big-scoring season, albeit he played two further full seasons under Joe Fagan – 1983/84 being the club’s first treble campaign – before taking charge himself in 1985, and then phasing himself out – and then, briefly, back in again to help land the 1986 title and FA Cup in his mid-30s).
Paisley’s mantra was not a hard-and-fast rule. Dalglish was always faster in mind than body. But as Bill Shankly found with an ageing side in 1970, sentiment cannot cloud the need to overhaul a squad if Father Time had taken its toll; something Paisley, at his side, had to be observing. The trick is discerning which players are melting, or which ones are just off form; and, of course, what someone who is still scoring goals might be costing in other areas of play.
My hunch has always been that you start to worry about players aged 29, except keepers and centrally-placed defensive players (thus including holding midfielders), who do less running and often use their experience to snuff out danger before needing to sprint. As such, anywhere up to mid-30s seems reasonable. (The same used to be true of playmakers and no.10s, like Dalglish, Dennis Bergkamp and Gianfranco Zola, but they’ve largely gone out of fashion; finding pockets of space and providing canny assists is still valuable, but the modern teams need more energy, with pressing, as noted, often a more effective ‘playmaker’.)
A quick scan of the goalscoring charts around Europe’s major leagues from 2020/21 suggested that there might be an extension to the life of the goalscorer.
Incredibly, five of the top 10 goalscorers in La Liga in 2020/21 were aged 33 or 34: Luis Suárez, Lionel Messi, Karim Benzema, José Luis Morales and some guy called Iago Aspas (who, incredibly, was also the league’s top-assister). A sixth, Antoine Griezmann, was aged 30, and of the four players to score the most goals, the average age was 32.2, with the youngster in the quartet, Villarreal’s Gerard Moreno (who would fail to score against the Reds in May 2022), sneaking in at the age of “just” 29. (All ages calculated as of the summer of 2021.) Of those, Aspas could be seen as a shining light, at 33: a late-bloomer, who retained his tenacity and desire. He is nothing short of a phenomenon in Spain – but in a team where he’s a settled and valued part of the setup. In 2021/22 he scored 18 league goals, four more than in the whole of 2020/21, to mean he’s never scored fewer than 14 La Liga goals in a season with Celta, dating back to 2015. Only Benzema scored more this past season.
In the Premier League, the average age for the top ten scorers was the more logical 27.9, which is just above the average age for a top team (26-28 is usually the average for title-winning Premier League; never below 25, never above 30). Only Jamie Vardy was older than 30 – he was 34, with two others scraping in at 30.
At the time of revisiting this, towards the end of 2021/22, eight Premier League players had 12 or more league goals. For six of the players the age-range was 28-37, with Harry Kane turning 29 in July. The other two, Diogo Jota, 25, and Ivan Toney, 26, are hardly kids, either. Bukayo Saka, 20, stood a goal behind, on 11. (The joint top-scorers as of the end of the season, Salah and Son, were both aged 29.)
A year ago, Robert Lewandowski led the Bundesliga charts by such a distance that he broke the all-time record, with 41 goals. He was aged 32. By the age of 33, at the time of writing, he’d played the same number of games as in 2020/21 (29 in the league, 40 overall), and whilst down nine league goals (a measly 32), he was only down from 48 to 46 in all competitions. Being in the league’s powerhouse team clearly helps, of course. In 2020/21, four of the top-11 scorers (four players were tied in 8th place) were aged 31-33, and seven of the 11 were aged 28 or over; but a few youngsters, like the freakish Erling Haaland, brought the average down to 27.5. Still, old-guns led the way.
Four of the top-ten scorers in Serie A in 2020/21 were in their 30s, with Juventus’ Ronaldo top-scorer, aged 36 (another good personal season, but the team were starting to suffer). Zlatan Ibrahimović, 39, missed out on the top ten by just one goal, with 15. Seven of the ten were aged 28 or over, and the average age was over 28. One more goal for Zlatan, and the average would have approached 30.
The average age of the 17 players who scored 20 or more goals in those four major leagues was 29, and 46% of the players (six of 13) who scored 21+ were in their 30s.
Of course, some of these older players would also have been penalty takers (and you can probably take a penalty aged 40 as well as aged 20, as it requires no stamina or speed; indeed, conversion success rates for penalties peaks at age 32-33), but Bruno Fernandes and Harry Kane were in the aged-27-and-under club in 2020/21, along with other penalty takers, so the same applies there. It’s not like all the younger goalscorers were scoring only open-play goals.
Lewandowski was better than ever, at 32, and Suárez, who looked leggy at Barcelona in an ageing side, won the title for Atlético, aged 34. Karim Benzema, at 33, just had the 2nd-best season of his career. A year later, Benzema bettered it: 27 in the league, and 44 in 46 games overall. He led the scoring charts in Spain, aged 34 (ahead of Aspas, aged 34); Lewandowski in Germany, aged 33; Salah and Son in England, aged 29; Ciro Immobile in Italy, aged 32.
Immobile helps prove a key point about a player’s stability at a club and the role that plays in longevity, and getting the best out of him. A success in Italy, he flopped badly in a year under Klopp in Germany. He then flopped on loan to Sevilla, and didn’t do much on loan back in Italy, with his old club Torino, in the second half of the same season – where he couldn’t quite rediscover his magic touch; a total of ten league goals across three clubs in two seasons. It’s hard to then explain why he suddenly scored 23 league goals at Lazio the next season, but he has remained at the Rome club ever since. Despite that good start at Lazio, his three best scoring seasons all eclipsed that first season, with 36 league goals in 2019/20, and 41 in all competitions in his second season. In 2021/22 he bagged 27 league goals in just 31 games, and 32 in 40 in all competitions (his third best in six prolific seasons in Rome).
Therefore, Immobile was not Immobile in Germany, nor in Spain. He even wasn’t Immobile back at his old club Torino, perhaps returning with the shame of failure, having left as a man on a mission. Again, we can look at whether or not Lazio (complete with ex-Reds Lucas Leiva and Luis Alberto), as a team, are doing as well as they should be, with just one top-four finish in Immobile’s time at the club, otherwise bobbing between 5th and 8th (they finished 5th again, ahead of Mourinho’s Rome rivals, Roma). Would they suffer if they lost Immobile’s goals, or would they do better as a team with a different attacking dynamic?
In Germany, Lewandowski is nearing 350 goals in eight seasons with Bayern, albeit he said it will be his last at the club, despite a year left on his deal. Clearly Lewandowski has proved to be a vital player rather than just a goal-machine – but even then, doubts about his attitude started to arise. (After Mané joined Bayern, Raphael Honigstein wrote, “A source close to a veteran player told the Athletic the team expect Lewandowski to move on. Quite a few have grown a little tired of his public posturing, to say nothing of the return of his egotistical streak on the pitch.”)
In England, Salah, with 23 league goals, was ending his fifth season at Liverpool, and Son Heung-Min, also with 23 goals, had been at Spurs for eight seasons. Running riot in Spain, Benzema had been at Real Madrid for thirteen years. Immobile, top-scoring in Italy, had been at Lazio for six seasons.
Prior to that, Ronaldo’s best seasons at Juventus were years two and three, after a fairly prolific but not mind-blowing first season. His best seasons at Real Madrid were years 2-6, again after a healthy start. When he left, he’d just scored 44 goals in 44 games – yet Juventus were on the slide, with too much focus on feeding their main-man’s ego.
Messi was slightly different in that he began his career with Barcelona at such a young age, and as such, was never going to be posting elite numbers aged 17 or 18, given that almost all goalscorers start to get really prolific only once in their 20s. But then he had a mind-blowing ten consecutive seasons scoring between 40 and 70 goals. Even when he left, he’d just bagged 30 league goals in 35 games. In Italy, Romelu Lukaku led Inter Milan to the title with 24 league goals, one better than his first season. The top scorer in France, Kylian Mbappé, may only be 23, but he had been at PSG since 2018.
Still settled at the same clubs, Salah, Son, Lewandowski, Immobile, Benzema and Mbappé led the scoring charts in the main five leagues. Meanwhile, super-scorers Messi, Ronaldo and Lukaku, having moved clubs in the summer of 2021 (with Messi and Lukaku making it clear that they happier where they had been), are well behind their prior peak output. Interestingly, young Dušan Vlahović was flying for Fiorentina in his third and fourth seasons (nearing a goal every game), but started life at Juventus only fairly well after a £70m move, at a goal every other game, even when in a better team.
In May 2022, Ian Hawkey wrote in the Times, “It’s not quite the outlook Vlahović signed up for in January, having rejected the idea of moving from Fiorentina to the Premier League – Arsenal were keen; Ralf Rangnick says that he pushed for Manchester United to make an offer – to become a generation-defining centre forward with Italy’s most decorated club. Juventus told Vlahović what he wanted to hear, when, four days after his 22nd birthday, they handed him a No 7 shirt recently vacated by Cristiano Ronaldo. “He’s right up there with the best,” [Massimiliano] Allegri said, “alongside Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappé.”
In an interesting addition, Hawkey notes how a certain striker scored a lot of goals but also saw his acquisition as a costly mistake.
“But then last season [Juan] Cuadrado had a different No 7 to aim at: the striker who averaged more than 30 goals per campaign from 2018 to 2021. For all that Juventus’s executives look back on the Ronaldo years as an expensive folly, he left big boots for any young tyro to fill.”
(Plus, why would you take the shirt that has extra weight, like a ton of lead, sewn into the number? Comparisons are already going to be drawn, with the idea to reduce pressure, not ramp it up.)
To be his best, Vlahović, like almost every other striker, needs to spend time at the same club, to generate understandings and match wavelengths. Antoine Griezmann, despite the £100m move (which, to my mind, was ludicrously over-hyped, and the showbiz nature of it saw him put too much pressure on himself), never scored as many for Barcelona in a campaign as he did in each of his five seasons at Atlético; Eden Hazard disappeared without trace at Real Madrid. The settled stars, as the biggest fish in their particular ponds, wilted with the move to the highest strata of club, with £100m+ price tags adding to the pressure.
Just as I often bang the gong for the value of a settled side and squad (all that shared knowledge, understanding and camaraderie) – at least until it naturally ages out – this shows that you cannot just transport an elite goalscorer into another team and see him repeat his output. Sometimes the goal tallies can immediately go up (see Salah at Liverpool), but the general trend appears to be that even older strikers, who seem to defy the ageing process, benefit from time, and a team set up to suit their needs; and that, once moved to another arena, their age can quickly start to show. Once aged 35 or 36, there isn’t the time to spend two or three years settling and adapting; the whole point of United signing Ronaldo was to fire them to the league title immediately.
Many of these elite club goalscorers also have merely ‘very good’ international records; in part due to playing for less successful nations. Yet even Messi, Mbappé, Agüero and Benzema, for elite nations, are/were nowhere near as prolific as in club football: dropping to a goal every two-to-three games, when often at almost a goal per game for their clubs; Immobile is closer to one-in-four for Italy. (Of his 15 goals for his country in 55 games, the first was against Holland; the rest against Israel, Macedonia, Liechtenstein, Albania, Finland, Armenia, Northern Ireland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Switzerland.)
A settled setting, and consistent selection, can make a huge difference. Even ageing strikers can thrive if the team is set up to meet their needs, albeit a veteran striker’s impressive goal output can sometimes come at the cost of the team scoring even more goals without them. That’s always the key factor: is the team successful?
The Fast-Improving Luis Díaz
When Liverpool signed Colombian Luis Díaz in January 2022 – bringing forward a deal planned for the summer as Spurs and others sniffed around – the Reds bought another fast-improving attacking player, whose goal return (if not his scintillating displays) fell below the standards he had started to set at Porto. Of course, by the end of the season he’d played more games than anyone else in the world, according to official studies; he tired a bit in the run-in, as you might expect.