Is it just us, or are all the best footballers getting younger? (No, it’s not just us)

Euro 2024 showed us the two extreme ends of football when it comes to player ages. Pepe became the oldest player ever to appear at the tournament; Luka Modric its oldest ever goalscorer; Cristiano Ronaldo, its oldest clown.

Advances in sports science and a better understanding of periodisation, rotation and minutes management have allowed players to stay in good nick and remain viable for longer than ever.

Yet in spite of this, Premier League squads are getting younger and younger. Between 2009/10 and 2018/19, the average age of the 20 top-flight sides did not dip below 26.5. It has done so in four of the past five seasons, with the general trend going gradually down.

Last season’s Premier League average, 26.01, was – by some distance – the youngest it has been in the past 25 years, a cut-off we set by virtue of that being as far back as we could be arsed to build a spreadsheet for.

For context, the second-youngest season, 2007/08, was 26.32. Not quite a third of a year – four months – may not sound like much, but that difference is greater than the gap between 2007/08 and 2011/12 (average 26.625 years) – which only was the 12th-youngest Premier League season.

Chelsea having the joint-youngest Premier League side of the past 25 years (just 23.7 years old) definitely helps that number; but even last season’s oldest team, Fulham (28.3), are only the 33rd-oldest Premier League side this century. Rank the oldest sides season by season, and last year’s was the sixth oldest.

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The thinking on when players are considered to be in their peak years has changed. For instance, ten years ago, a central midfielder might be considered to be in his prime aged 28-30. Many analysts place that peak at more like 25-27 now.

Yes, teenagers like Lamine Yamal and Cavan Sullivan have drawn the headlines, and rightly so, for their record-breaking teenage exploits, but it’s the slightly older age group that prompted us to think about this in the first place.

The Premier League data’s downward trend suggests it is not simply a case of the Messi/Ronaldo/Modric generation finally stepping aside and letting someone else share the spotlight. But it’s interesting that now they have, it is not the players five to ten years their junior that are filling the shoes, but players who are 15 to 20 years younger.

Even if we dismiss Yamal as the one-off he is, Nico Williams, Bukayo Saka and Jude Bellingham – all aged 21 or 22 – are not just emerging youngsters for club and country, but leading stars.

Vinicius Jr, the favourite for the Ballon d’Or, turned 24 just last week; there hasn’t been a younger winner since Lionel Messi claimed his second in 2012, nor a winner aged under 30 since Messi’s fifth, in 2015.

That juvenation, if you will, of football has happened so gradually we have barely noticed it happening. Why this youth revolution is occurring, and why it is happening now, is a fascinating question to which we don’t profess to know the answer.

Whether it has arisen from a change in the way players’ metrics are analysed, or a change in the game itself, is debatable. It could be that clubs are responding to an analytics trend, rather than the analytics reflecting a change that has happened organically – a kind of football quantum theory, where the act of observation changes the very thing it is observing.

The Covid-inspired change to five substitutions from larger benches may also have accelerated things, not just by giving more opportunities for players to get minutes from the bench, but because coaches are actively changing the way they manage games. We spoke to a fitness coach at one English club recently who confirmed that since that change, some managers are asking more of their players to go all out for 60-70 minutes knowing they will by substituted, rather than pacing themselves to last the 90 minutes.

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It could also be the result of a change in tactical philosophy. The age of safety-first low blocks has given way to the Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola school of high-intensity, highly systematised football.

Bellingham’s generation will have had their most formative years in their respective academies at exactly the time that came into vogue, inspired by the influential Barcelona, Spain, Borussia Dortmund and Germany teams of the late 2000s-early 2010s; it is perhaps not a surprise that they are better capable of playing that style than those who got their early football education just a few years before, when Rafa Benitez and Jose Mourinho were the cause celebres of European football.

Now if only somebody could produce a good centre-forward…