State of the Premiership

As of day 5 of the new season, this is the state of the Premiership...
Players

As looked likely, we've acquired a few more players than in the last couple of updates - at least 10 new faces are out on the training grounds, making 436 players in the Premiership (21.8 per squad on average). The differences in squad sizes are bigger than ever though - from Rex Mundi and Lancaster Bombers with 17 players each through to Karachi United and Easyfit Walsall on 26 and 27 apiece (although the other teams are spread fairly evenly between these extremes).

Chaos Shumen's successful youth promotions result in having the youngest squad again - a mere 22.9 years old - just under 6 years younger than Liverpool City's ongoing collection of geezers at 28.4 (to be fair though, that average will drop when the venerable Wayne Preston retires at the grand old age of 39 ;) As with the previous two updates at least, the division average is roughly as it was at 25.1 years old.

Contracts

There's going to be a few more players out of contract this season - 68 in total, and amongst them, quite a few retirees who will be missed by their respective managers.

On average, a Premiership player has 163 days left on their contract (one day more than the previous update half a season ago!) and Inter Milager are now the only team that won't have to worry about renewals for a while, with 232 days on average, unlike Mad Dogs United who'll need to be doing a lot of paperwork over the next 108 days.

Wages

Players' agents have been working overtime since last time and those contract renewals haven't come cheap - we collectively pay 2.9m per day to our teams... On average, a squad bill in the Premiership is 133k (not much more than before) but the spread between teams is shown up even more than in their relative sizes, going from Forester's 78,530 (beating the next closest of Chaos Shumen by over 10k!) to Botev Plovdiv's incredible 182,845 daily wage bill.

But the both the Scrooge and Peter Ridsdale Awards go to none of those teams - the miserly spend of a mere 3,906 per player on Easyfit Walsall's huge squad shows there's been some swift negotiating going on there in order to keep the Scrooge Award for a second time. And Rex Mundi keep the Peter Ridsdale Award in their trophy cabinet, continuing to treat their players to a shade over 10k each per day. That's one more milestone passed - now how long til the first 200k squad bill...?


And that's the start of the season roundup - most teams now have between 19-24 players aged 23-26 with a bill of 110-150k per day with an average of 140-180 days left on their contracts - all in all, pretty similar to before but there are definitely some much greater extremes in these figures.