The Average Age Rule

The average age of your team has an effect on the performance in a match. According to the Xpert Eleven rules page, your team performs at 100% only if the average age of the players is 26 or higher. The performance of the team gets worse as the average age decreases.

I looked around in the forums and found that the relation between the average age and performance is a linear function for age below 26. To find how much the performance level will be for a particular average age, you have to multiply the average age by 3.846 (that's 100/26). For example, if your team's average age is 22, the performance level will be (22*100/26) = 84.6%.

This graph shows the performance levels of the team for different values of average age:



Having young players is a good thing, but having too many of them will bring down your team's average age and cause a drop in performance. Always keep a few good older players in the squad to make sure you have a high enough average age.

Is the average age of your team above 26? Have you noticed a dip in performance whenever you play a younger team?

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Where are all the young goalkeepers?

I recently came across this interesting discussion in the Xpert Eleven forums regarding the minimum age of goalkeepers. You can easily find outfield players who are 16 years old, but there are no 16 year old goalkeepers.

Apparently, this is because the average age of retirement for goalkeepers in Xpert Eleven is one year more than that for outfield players and increasing minimum age for goalies makes up for the extra year they play.

This higher age of retirement reflects the situation in real world football. You just have to look at Portsmouth's (and England's) David James and Man United's (and Holland's) van der Sar -- both aged 38 -- to know that goalkeepers retire later than outfield players.

What was the skill/age of the best goalkeeper you ever received from your youth system? And what was the age of the oldest goalkeeper to play for your teams?

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