What a promoted Premier League squad actually looks like

Every August the same three sentences get written about the promoted clubs. They will need to strengthen. They lack Premier League experience. They must not get cut adrift.

None of that describes a squad. So we counted one. All 550 registered players across the twenty Premier League clubs, each with a club, a position, a nationality and a date of birth, and then split them into the seventeen who were here last season and the three who were not: Coventry City, Ipswich Town and Hull City.

The gap is not subtle, and it is not really about quality. It is about what kind of footballer wins a Championship.

Older, by more than a year

A year and a half of average age sounds mild until you look at where it comes from. Nearly a quarter of the promoted clubs' players are 30 or over, against one in seven everywhere else.

Hull carry it furthest: nine of their 24 players are 30 or older, more than any club in the division, including Jack Butland and John Egan at 33 and Semi Ajayi at 32. Ipswich have David Button at 37, one of the four oldest men in the league. Coventry's Ben Wilson is 34.

There is nothing accidental about this. A Championship season is 46 games plus play-offs, on worse pitches, against opponents who will kick you. Clubs chasing promotion buy players who have already proven they can get through that, and a 28-year-old who has done it four times is worth more in that market than a 19-year-old who might.

Smaller, by three and a half players

Twenty-eight against 24.7 does not sound like much either, until you notice what the extra bodies are for. The established clubs are not carrying three more starters. They are carrying three more prospects.

Chelsea register 38 players, the largest squad in the league, and 13 of them are 20 or under. Bournemouth have seven, Aston Villa, Brentford and Manchester United six each.

Coventry, Ipswich and Hull have registered one apiece. One. Caleb Yirenkyi at Coventry, Sindre Walle Egeli at Ipswich, Jens Hjertø-Dahl at Hull, and that is the entire under-21 population of the promoted three.

That is the single sharpest number in the data and it is the one nobody writes about in August. A promoted squad is not a smaller version of an established squad. It is a squad with the development wing removed.

More British, by a lot

Sixty-five nationalities play in this Premier League. They are not evenly spread.

Ipswich field nine nationalities in a squad of 23, fewer than any club in the division, and 74 percent of their players are British or Irish. Hull are on 58 percent. Coventry, the most cosmopolitan of the three at 14 nationalities, still run at 44 percent.

At the other end, Brighton are 21 percent British across 18 nationalities and Brentford spread 32 players across 21 countries. Between Ipswich and Brighton there is a 53-point gap in the same league.

Again the cause is the market rather than a philosophy. Championship recruitment runs on the domestic loan and free-transfer economy, where the scouting is cheap, the wages are payable and the player can start on Saturday. Signing from abroad is a Premier League budget with a Premier League downside, and a club that spends three seasons in the Championship builds a British squad whether it meant to or not.

Does it change after a year?

Two clubs came up last season and stayed, which is a sample of two and not a trend, but it is the only evidence there is.

Sunderland now look like an established squad on the numbers that matter most: 31 percent British across 16 nationalities, a squad of 26, six players over 30. On nationality they have converted completely.

Leeds have not. They are still 48 percent British, still on a squad of 23, and they have registered zero players aged 20 or under, the only club in the league with none at all.

So one season buys you a rebuild if you spend like Sunderland, and one season buys you very little if you do not. What neither of them has bought back yet is an academy pipeline that shows up on a team sheet, and that is the part that takes longer than a transfer window.

What this does to the guessing game

If you play the Premier League puzzle, this is usable.

The age clue and the club clue are correlated in a way they are not in the other leagues. A mystery player over 30 is disproportionately likely to be at Hull, Fulham, Aston Villa or Newcastle. A mystery player aged 20 or under is overwhelmingly at Chelsea, and almost certainly not at a promoted club, because there are only three such players across all three of them.

Nationality does the same work in reverse. A green England clue leaves you a wide field, but if the region clue then points at East Anglia or Yorkshire, the promoted clubs are where the English players are concentrated. A player from somewhere unusual is far more likely to be on the south coast than in Hull.

None of it is certainty. All of it is edge, and edge is the whole game when you have ten guesses.

Our average age by position study covers the other axis these numbers move along, and the shirt number census covers what a squad number gives away. Every figure in all three is counted from the same squad lists the daily puzzles draw from, which means the patterns are quietly waiting inside today's board.