The Amount of Ajax 1 Experience

The Amount of Ajax 1 Experience

09/09/2014

After we did the comparison yesterday with respect to how much Ajax 1 experience is lost each season, we thought more about this and concluded that yesterday's numbers do not give a clear picture. The conclusion that we do not need to worry because approximately the same amount of experience is lost each year is too easy. The numbers do not give an idea of how much Ajax 1 experience is still left in the selection and how that has changed over the years. We will try to do that now.
We think this is a good measurement for the value of the selection. Of course experience at the highest level for other clubs is relevant as well, but we do not have that information in our database. Besides one of the characteristics of the Ajax game is that it is not always easy (or possible) for players who play well at other clubs to perform well at Ajax, making experience for Ajax 1 important.
We have for each of the seasons looked at how many official matches each of the players of the selection that was still under contract with Ajax after the summer transfer window closed had played (at the end of the previous season), excluding players who were on loan the complete season. As an example we did consider Eyong Enoh and Danny Hoesen for the 2013-14 season, even though both were on loan for the second part of the season. We look at matches for this comparison, because the information was easily available in our database compared to played minutes. We do feel that a comparison based on minutes would have been better, but do not think there would be a significantly change in the observerd pattern.
The results of this comparison can be found in the tabel below:

Season Ajax 1 Matches
2014-15 792
2013-14 952
2012-13 1013
2011-12 1177
2010-11 1402


The past seasons each time about 160 matches were lost (nett). If we consider an average season to consist of 48 official matches and each match on average to have 2 substitutions, Ajax would normally in 1 season add 624 matches of experience to the squad. This would mean that if we continue like this one more season, the average Ajax 1 experience of next seasons selection would be roughly 1 season.
Next to the average experience there are also less and less individual players with significant Ajax 1 experience. In the first 3 seasons of our experience each time there were 5 or 6 players that had already played 100 matches for Ajax at the start of the season. At the start of last season only De Jong, Vermeer and Enoh had reached the milestone, although Enoh was not used last season. Daley Blind reached the milestone during the previous season, but already left. Ricardo van Rhijn also reached the milestone during the season and is currently the only player in the selection who has reached the 100 official matches for Ajax 1 milestone.
One question is whether Frank de Boer is able to perform a miracle once again and become the champion, another is how long fans will be able to identify with players that on average only play so few matches for Ajax before they leave.
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