Ben Carter
speaker
694 appearances
29 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2013
last heard Aug 2018
Ben Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Peak.
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That's an interesting word, Charlotte.
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It's often said that footballers are at their peak between the ages of 27 and 29.
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And a trawl through the archive shows that the mean age of a footballer in a winning World Cup final team is 27 and a half.
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Well, if we take an average football career as starting at 18 and finishing at 35, then the midpoint is 26.5.
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So yes, the peak is starting around halfway through their career.
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That's right.
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Well, this 27.5 number also happens to be the mean age of the 32 teams that played in the first group matches.
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And the median age is very close.
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If you listed all 32 teams in order of age from the youngest, Nigeria, at 24.4, to the oldest, the United States, at 29.5, the two teams in the middle of the table, England and Australia, both have an average of 27.4.
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Well, to be fair, we, the media, made just as much of the youth, as you call it, angle as Roy Hodgson did himself.
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But no, the figures show that England had the 16th youngest or the 17th oldest starting line-up in the tournament, depending on which way you want to look at it.
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Hmm.
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Their team was clearly older than previous tournaments, as they were using a lot of the players that had won them trophies in the past.
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But the average age of the starting line-up that got hammered by the Netherlands, 28.7, was exactly the same as that of Argentina.
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And...
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Well, they've not done too badly.
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Well, let's look at it this way.
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In 1958, Brazil won the World Cup with a team with an average age of 26.3, which was one of the youngest teams ever to win it.
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Four years later, they won with the oldest team to win a World Cup, an average of 30.7.
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Showing 181–200 of 694 · page 10 of 35
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