Manchester United fielded the most players at English Premier League level since the start of the season. At the opposite end of the table is Arsenal. Arsène Wenger only used 21 players so far, while Louis van Gaal already fielded 28 footballers. The data for all clubs is available in issue number 135 of the Big-5 Weekly Post.
Previous research from the CIES Football Observatory suggests that sticking on a core group of footballers often allows clubs obtaining top level results. No team who heads the table in its respective league used more than 24 players. This figure is 20 for Napoli, 22 for Leicester and Bayern Munich, 23 for Paris St-Germain and 24 for Barcelona.
Conversely, frequent line-up changes tend to reflect anxiety which is detrimental to the improvement of results. So far, clubs at the bottom of the table in their respective league on average fielded 26.0 players. This figure is 22.2 for clubs heading the table, 23.6 for the top three ranked teams per league and 25.3 at big-5 league level.
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