Success and failure a question of rotation
The time when the difference between success and failure begins to depend on the depth of your squad and how you manage your resources.
The days when a club would rely on one group of 14 or 15 players throughout a season are long gone, especially in Italy and Spain where player rotation has been a routine practice for decades. But when it comes to the core group there are some big differences between countries and between clubs within those countries.
The CIES Football Observatory — the Swiss sports research centre linked to FIFA — has just produced some calculations about how clubs in the five top European leagues use this core group.
The data comes from Opta and relates to the 11 players at each club who have played most minutes in league matches this season. The figures imply that the clubs that do best rely more heavily on that preferred 11. And the CIES also concludes that “bad results encourage coaches to change more frequently their line-ups. Rather than improving results, this strategy tends often to aggravate the situation.”
So it may be a bad idea to change a losing team as well as a winning team. Not exactly, because when you look at the detail some of the teams who are neck and neck in the title race seem to have opposite approaches to rotation.
In Spain the club that has used its preferred 11 most intensively is Atletico Madrid. Diego Simeone’s core group have played 86.1% of the time. By contrast the core 11 at Real Madrid have played 76.4% of the time, and Tata Martino at Barcelona has rotated his players so much that his core group have played only 70.4% of the available minutes. That’s much the same as struggling sides such as Getafe and Levante.
In the Premier League Roberto Martinez has rotated least — his core group at Everton have played 81.3% of the time — while Manuel Pellegrini at Manchester City has switched his players around as much as David Moyes at United. Only Sunderland and Fulham have rotated more than the two Manchester clubs.
Evidently managers with most depth in their squad such as City and Barcelona feel most relaxed about resting their stars. The same is true of Paris Saint-German in France — core 11 used 73.4% of the time — compared to Lille with 84.3%. The testing period for clubs like Lille and Everton and Atletico Madrid is about to start. They will almost certainly have to rotate more because of the risk of fatigue.
By contrast at least some of clubs involved in a struggle against relegation will surely have to decide who their core players are and stick with them — for reasons of morale as much as anything else. The big unknown is which managers are using their resources to best effect. Pep Guardiola is a good example. German clubs seem to rotate their players less — they do have a smaller league — and Guardiola’s core group have played 78% of the time, quite a contrast with his former club in Spain. It is when you look at which core players Guardiola has used least that you realise the strength Bayern Munich have available for the coming months.
Statistics show Philipp Lahm has played 83% of the time, Thomas Muller 78% and Franck Ribery 70%. But the figures for Bastien Schweinsteiger, Arjen Robben and Javier Martinez are just 57%, 52% and 27% respectively. Guardiola is now thinking of switching Martinez from midfield to centre back to give him more playing time. With Bayern seemingly home and dry to retain their domestic title this could be the moment to put money on them becoming the first side to retain the Champions League as well.
