Young against younger in the Bundesliga – leaders VfB in Leipzig

With the youngest team in the Bundesliga, VfB Stuttgart has shot up to the top of the table. VfB has been the youngest team for years, replacing opponents from Leipzig.

Otto Rehhagel, one of the defining figures in 60 years of Bundesliga history, refused in the categories “young or old” to think. For him, according to the champion coach of Werder Bremen and 1. FC Kaiserslautern, there is only one “good or bad”.

In contrast to form, injured players, suspensions, home football and the quality of the squad, the average age of a football team has only rarely made it into a criterion that helps with forecasts and root cause analysis. Nobody said that it was clear that VfB Stuttgart would win 5-0 against VfL Bochum because of the age of the players. After all, the professionals used by Stuttgart were more than four years younger on average.

Exactly, the players of VfB came to an average of 24.35 years, those of VfL to 28.65. Sorting in ascending order results in a table constellation that corresponds exactly to that in the Bundesliga table: Stuttgart is first, VfL last.

Now tables after the first day of the game are the famous snapshot, but in the case of the teams involved they confirm the data of the past few years. During the 2021/22 season, the Bochum team had an average of 28.1 years after their promotion, and even 29.11 in the past season.

In each of the past three seasons, VfB provided the youngest team. In the 2022/23 season, the average age of all players used was 24.67 years, before that it was 24.15, in the 2020/21 season it was 24.51. The figures were calculated by the data service provider Sportec Solutions. It should be noted that calculations are made in years and days and this results in an exact value.

Different figures from other sources could be due to the fact that only the players in the starting XI are taken into account and/or the days are not included in the calculation.

Record for Leipzig

VfB will start the second game day on Friday at RB Leipzig (from 8.20 p.m. live on the radio report and in the ticker on the sports show). The Saxons had an average age of 26.15 in their 2-3 defeat at Bayer Leverkusen. That was a good six months younger than in the entire past season – 26.79. Leipzig’s average age rose enormously in 2022/23, having been under 25.5 in the previous two seasons.

Since promotion in 2016, RB has been the youngest team for four seasons in a row. The average was never above 24.5. In the 2017/18 season it was only 23.77 years. No other team has scored below 24 in the past ten years.

The table below only includes clubs that have played in the Bundesliga for at least five of the past ten seasons. The oldest team on average during this period was FC Bayern, which became German champions in every season of the period under review.

Munich rarely trains players themselves, but mostly brings in professionals with experience and proven high quality. This explains the average age of more than 27 years.

Coach Urs Fischer also relies on a comparatively old team at 1. FC Union. The Berliners are not represented in the table because they only played four seasons in the Bundesliga. They were never younger than 27.53 years, in the 2021/22 season the average age was even 28.57 years.

Descent for the “old” Stuttgarter

In the past ten years, VfB Stuttgart has never even come close to such an average. Only twice was the value higher than 26. Both times the Stuttgart team was relegated.