Until that day, in six years at the club, he missed only three games through injury and has played 311 games in all competitions. He may by some be considered the Red Devils' Most Valuable Player, he may even be their highest paid, but with 99 per cent availability for a combative midfield player, not to mention over 100 goals and the same number of assists that he has contributed, then I would suggest that he might be a bargain.
The same might be said of his countryman Cristiano Ronaldo, who in 18 years has missed only 83 of the nearly 1,200 games that he could have played. Half of which were more than 15 years ago, when he missed 40 games due to a serious ankle problem early in his career. Imagine that, a player whose trademark was speed and ability from wide areas, and who was the target for every defender he played against – the quicker they cut him down, the quicker he got up, winked at his adversary, and went again.
The point that I am trying to make is that analysing the cost per game, goal, assist, or even minute of any player can give us a very different view of a player’s value to the club.
The level of physiological understanding of all athletes, together with the fitness programmes devised by the sports scientists and the massive advancement in sports medicine have made the career of a professional footballer safer.
Nowadays, careers are rarely ended by injuries, a cruciate ligament injury used to be career-ending, and while it remains a serious injury which might keep you out for a full season, the prospect of a full recovery is now good. Broken legs are now a rarity, and hamstring injuries, once the bane of a rapid winger, are now significantly less frequent. But injuries still happen, and some players appear more accident-prone than others.
Sir Alex Ferguson once said that, when assessing a transfer target, their injury history was one of the key things that he looked at. I’m not sure that the evidence supports that, as otherwise he might surely have thought again about the likes of Louis Saha and Juan Sebastian Veron. He also took a massive risk when signing Ruud Van Nistelrooy, who had spent a year out with an ACL rupture immediately prior to his eventual arrival at Old Trafford. Of course, that gamble paid off in spades!
Losing a player through injury is always challenging, but as ever, we don’t need to shed too many tears for the clubs in the Premier League, as they seem to have money to burn, and nowadays, because some of their prized assets are so valuable, they can insure them both against a career-ending injury. Imagine paying £125 million for Alexander Isak only for him to break his leg on his first outing!
The lower league clubs can’t afford such financial protection, and with small squads, losing a key player for any length of time can ruin an otherwise promising campaign.
Today, we are buried under a mountain of data analysis xG, xA, BCC, PSxG-GA, but these are mostly in-game statistics and who knows what they all mean. The likes of Brentford and Brighton have become well known for their extensive use of data analysis in talent acquisition. They deserve enormous credit for how successful that has been in uncovering the likes of Ivan Toney, Bryan Mbeumo, Moises Caicedo, etc but I don’t know how their model assesses physiology and injury record.
(Image: Jennifer Lorenzini, REUTERS)
A lot of the data required to analyse a player is now freely available, but a few years ago, during my time as Chairman, we tracked a number of simple data points. One of those was the player's cost per minute played - a simple calculation dividing the player's wages by the number of minutes completed on the pitch. We organised it like a league table with the lowest cost per minute at the top and the highest at the bottom.
Of course, there were some of the younger and fringe players who seemed expensive because they didn’t get to play very often. But, among the core squad, the figures were striking. Some of the highest earners, such as Gordon Greer and Jonathan Douglas, were top of the table because they played almost every minute of every game, and their cost was, in some cases, less than £20 per minute played – by the way, Bruno Fernandes costs more than 100 times that amount!
But at the bottom of our league table was one of the highest earners who spent all of his time in the treatment room, not with a major injury but with an endless succession of minor ailments – I won’t embarrass him by naming him here.
(Image: Andy Crook)
Of course, it’s not always a player’s fault, injuries like accidents happen - Harry Smith will be an expensive player to carry in the squad this year following his knee injury, but hopefully he will recover and repay the club in future years.
But the fact remains that value for money in the lower leagues is important, and with small budgets, managing players and injuries is crucial to completing a season of maybe 60 games. Everton ultimately tired of Dominic Calvert-Lewin because in four years, he missed 529 days and 75 games through injury, and they felt that his wage cost could be better deployed elsewhere. Leeds are to be admired for taking the risk on such a talented striker, but you can bet that they are managing his fitness very carefully to ensure that they get the best out of him.
Buying the right players in the first place, managing them across the season, as well as having access to loan players to fill the gaps at reasonable cost and risk, are all part of the challenge facing a club trying to mount and then maintain a successful promotion campaign.