Question: aside from truly niche sports, what sports have mass appeal in a single country and nowhere else? Baseball and world football (soccer to us Americans) expanded far and wide at the beginning of the 20th century. The North American-based National Hockey League and National Basketball Association has experienced an influx of European-born players, even Hall of Famers and first-round draft picks. Rugby in Japan. Cricket in the United States. Hurling in Argentina? Perhaps sumo and wife-carrying are examples, but how about team sports? Sure better examples exist.
[Another topic for further discussions is international competitions where athletes’ nationalities are very fluid, dual citizenships or political reasons leading to some bizarre circumstances.]
Many sports have transcended the national borders of their origin, yet considered these sports national when in fact they are truly multi-national. Approximately 30% of Major League Baseball players were born outside the United States and the same for National Hockey League players born outside the United States and Canada.
Changes Since Inception
The English Premier League was created for the 1992-93 season as the new top-tier in English football, leading to fundamental changes in world football finances: in 1992-92 the top salary was £10,000 per week; in 2022-23 it was £425,000 per week. This is nowhere near the inflation rate for the same period.
Starting with its first season, I wanted to better understand how (if?) player demographics changed during the 31 EPL seasons: the countries represented, the percentage of England or Home Nations players; differences between the Big Six and the others. Stuff like that. To date, Brexit does not appear to have affected teams’ ability to sign European players (other than increased bureacracy).
Analyzing teams outside the top-tier (English Football League, Tier 2 through) could be interesting but the only data I’ve found it the Championship since 2001-02. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time.
Data Gathering
Another member of the Sports Reference family of sites, FBRef is your source for all things world football: teams, leagues, competitions, matches, and – most importantly – players. Want to learn about Sheffield Wednesday‘s 1898-99 season when their 18th finished resulting in relegation from First Division? They’ve got it!
Beginning with the six never-relegated, founding members of the Premier League – Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United, and Tottenham – I added three teams who have spent most of their seasons in the Premier League – Aston Villa, Manchester City, and Newcastle United.
Lacking access to the raw data, I created a spreadsheet and captured the number of players by country, team-by-team, season-by-season (from 1992-92 through 2022-23). As second division data is not available prior to the EFL First Division 2001-02 season (now the EFL Championship), Manchester City and Newcastle United are missing a handful of seasons.
Typos are guaranteed since I manually counted players per country and then transferred to my spreadsheet, but overall I’m confident that it’s accurate enough for this discussion.
Squad Size
The dramatic influx of money has not dramatically changed the average squad sizes, where the average 25.75 players per squad in 1992-93 is only slightly less than the 28.11 players per squad in 2022-23.
While Chelsea received much bad press for their 34 players who played in 2022-23, during 2015-16 Liverpool and Manchester United both played 34 players and Newcastle United – who were relegated – played a whopping 37 different players!
Players’ Nationalities
The number of nationalities represented in the EPC has roughly doubled since the 1992-93 season, both per squad and across the nine squads surveyed.
The average increased gradually, first doubling in 2007-08 and mostly leveling out; since 2019-20 it has hovered around 14.
The total number of nationalities has had large swings, e.g, 9 additional nationalities in both 1997-98 and 2000-01. Since 2012-13, at least 45 different nationalities have been represented each year.
There is a definite upward trend squad-by-squad, though not consistent or continual. In 2008-09, Aston Villa fell to just 9 different nationalities represented before jumping to 13 the next season. Between 2006-07 and 2007-08, Manchester City jumped from 12 to 19 nationalities on the squad.
Home-Grown Players
Now it gets interesting: how has the percentage of either English or British players compared with all other nationalities changed over EPL’s thirty-one seasons?
To clarify: internationally, anyone born in England, Scotland, Wales, or North Ireland has United Kingdom citizenship. Surprisingly – at least to outsiders – for reasons predating FIFA, each home nation competes separately in international competitions: FIFA considers each a separate nationality, players compete as English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Ireland and not British (a.k.a., United Kingom). Therefore, each can be considered separated for this discussion.
[This does cause consternation for non-English players as the Olympics does not see each as separate nations.]
English Nationality
At the onset of the Premier League, over three-quarters of the players had English nationality, but a steady decrease year-over-year has left less than one-third of 2022-23 players are English.
Per-squad the trend is also downwards but there are outliers: in 2022-23 Everton fielded over 50% English players (14 of 26 players) while in 2006-07 Arsenal had only 4% (1 of 25 players).
Home Nations Nationalities
Including all Home Nations doesn’t really change the analysis: the percentage of Home Nations nationality (United Kingdom citizenship) has fallen from 80% in 1992-93 to 40% in 2022-2023.
Minutes Played Per Player
FBRef aggregates its raw data to provide total number of players and minutes played by nationality for each Premier League season, i.e., during the 1992-93 season, 363 English players played a total number of 619,408 minutes.
One measurement I thought might be interesting is the minutes-per-player by nationality and see trends pop up. It’s by no means perfect: injury, squad size, substitution patterns means comparisons are not guaranted. But I’ll try anyway.
Once again, I manually entered data from FBRef into my spreadsheet for any nationality with at least 1% of total players over 31 seasons: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Ivory Coast, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Scotland and Wales. These totals are for all teams and won’t match with limited teams I used above.
Also, the Premier League had 22 teams and played 42 games in its first three seasons (1992-95), which further skews results, so I’m starting with the 1995-96 season (28 instead of 31 seasons).
And to repeat: typos are guaranteed, but nothing egregious to fundamentally impact conclusions (if any).
English Nationality
It appears that the amount of time English players are on the field has definitely declined. One possible explanation is that squads carry extra English players who only occasionally play, but in fact year-over-year the total number of English players is roughly the same after an initial big decline.
Other Home Nations
It’s not as easy to see a definitive reduction in player-minutes for the other Home Nations until the last few seasons; however, due to over lower player counts, a sudden rise would be easy to achieve.
Irish Nationality
I included Ireland because it has the second largest number of players, approximately 1/8th the size of England. The player-minutes were fairly stable until 2013-14 after which they’ve dropped precipitously.
Other Nationalities
Interpreting other countries is made difficult by the low number of players for each nationality: in 1998-99 a single Brazil player played almost every minute of the season; the number of Dutch and French players is fairly consistent; the number of Norwegian players has been halved; the number of Spanish players has grown from nothing to mid-30s per season.
I’m not a statistician so I’m not even sure these numbers are usable, but in general I believe it’s difficult to draw any conclusions.
Conclusions
It seems fairly safe to say that the demographics in top-tier English football has definitely changed since the EPL’s first season, but it’s difficult to determine why: manager, more international managers, more English players deciding to play overseas? A lot more analysis with a lot more data is required before we can begin to understand the why; the if, however, is indisputable.
Data
You’re welcome to download my spreadsheet and do whatever you want with it.
Image Attribution
“Teenagers playing soccer in the rain” by marlon.net is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
