30 is the new 27: Why the age of Premier League players is rising

In the Premier League and beyond, one of the biggest payouts this summer has been for players approaching or over the age of 30.

One of the big anomalies of this summer's transfer window has been the amount of money spent on what are perceived to be 'older' players. Whether it's seemingly boracic Barcelona dropping £40m on 33-year-old Robert Lewandowski, Lionel Messi still walking for PSG at the ripe old age of 35 or Cristiano Ronaldo still looking of Champions League football at 37, the stars of 10 years ago are still the stars of today, and it doesn't stop there either.

From the Harry Kane saga to last summer at Nottingham Forest agreeing to pay Jesse Lingard between £80,000 and £200,000 a week when he turns 30 at the end of the year, the maximum age for a footballer being about 27 years old is starting to look a bit overwhelmed. At the end of the 2019/20 season, for example, the top scorers in four of Europe's top five leagues - Jamie Vardy, Messi, Lewandowski and Ciro Immobile - were all 30 or older while, of the two co-top scorers in France who were under 30, even one of them – Wissam Ben Yedder from Monaco – was 29.

It's not entirely related to position, although it's clear that some positions age better than others. At one extreme, a statistical analysis by The Athletic (£) revealed that in terms of the desire to face and beat opponents, wingers start high and peak in their early twenties, with a big drop in the number of "handling" attempts from around 29 years old.

At the other end of the spectrum, goaltenders seem to peak around two years later than those in outfield positions, a statistic most likely influenced by a combination of the fact that a large portion of the goaltending goal is learned behavior such as closing angles and body positioning and the fact that less running, with all the wear and tear problems that puts on muscles and joints, is needed when you maintain your goal.

It's also worth remembering that there are fewer players now whose players are eliminated early through injury. Boots are no longer clogs, match balls no longer look like medicine balls, and pitches are lush green carpets for most professionals compared to the mud baths of the past, but it's also worth adding that injuries that were probably career-ending 60 or 70 years ago can be fully recoverable today, thanks to changing treatment patterns. We know how to deal with serious injuries far better than at any time in the past. It's entirely plausible that if you had mentioned a "metatarsal" to the average 1950s gamer, they might have thought you were talking about a dinosaur.

Wounds are treated very differently than they were in the past. Professional clubs now have phalanxes of nutritionists, injury specialists and analysts whose job it is to make sure players play at their peak for as long as possible. Players simply can't be utterly disposable assets in the Premier League anymore, and that's only getting worse the closer you get to its peak. They are, to say the least, high-value financial assets, and the trend towards amortization of player contracts means they are much less likely to be fired than before.