Why Lionel Messi’s birthday matters

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Many die-hard Messi fans knew (and perhaps even celebrated) that Argentina’s renowned center forward turned the ripe old age of 27 on June 24, in the middle of this year’s World Cup. How does his age compare to the other global football stars? And how does age relate to team market value?

In the below SAS Visual Analytics line chart, we compared team transfer fee value – an aggregate of each player’s “trade value” from one football team to another – to the average age of a team.

Note the high value (over 450 million GBPs!) of a relatively young German team – with an average player age of just under 26-years-old. Spain, Brazil and Argentina are also highly valued, but are more mature with higher player age averages. While the range of ages is small, could this mean a prosperous future for the German team? To round out the final four World Cup 2014 teams, Netherlands is on the young side just like Germany, with lesser market value.

Data came from the Transfermkt web site

Here is a breakdown of the distribution of age in the World Cup 2014, with the median age spanning between 27 and 29-years-old.

Data came from the Transfermkt web site.

What other relationships jump out at you from these graphs? Belgium is a young team and in the top six valued teams – is there bright future there?

Maybe now you’ll pay more attention to player birthdays in this final week of the tournament. Don’t miss other World Cup insights through related visualizations on the community.