How Old are the Players?

One question to ask is: How old are players when they play international matches? What is the distribution of players’ ages for the matches bets are offered on?

The methodology is fairly simple. Take all matches from the database and select those that have odds. Then for each match, for each player that participated in this match calculate the age at the date of the match. The age consists of the age in years and the fraction of the year between the last birthday and the match in question. For the averages, the age including the fractional part is used. For the distributions only the age in years is used. If the player’s date of birth is not known, the player is skipped.

This analysis includes matches from 2010 until today. In total the analysis included 87996 different matches with 7844 different players. The data was divided by the five disciplines, for mixed doubles it was further divided into male and female players.

As mentioned above, for some players the date of birth is not known. Moreover for some players there are implausible dates leading to some entries for very young ages. Nevertheless the entries for older ages, up to 65, seem to be genuine, as there are some older players, like Matthew Fogarty or Svetlana Zilberman, competing in international tournaments.

Averages

The averages are as follows:

Women’s singles players are the youngest, followed by women’s doubles and the female mixed doubles players. For the men, the singles players are the youngest, while the difference between men’s doubles players and male mixed doubles players is negligible. The difference for singles players between males and females is about one and a half years.

Distributions

The distribution of ages is given in the following table.

The central section of this data is given in the following plot.

There are a couple of things to note in this plot: Most entries are for men’s doubles and women’s doubles as there are 4 players per match adding to the histogram. There are more men’s singles than women’s singles. All plots peak around the age of 21. The plot for women’s singles reaches the peak earlier than the plot for men’s singles. Both singles’ curves fall rapidly after ages of around 21. The plots for mixed doubles are lowest as there are only two players per match contributing to each curve. The curve for male players is shifted to the right, thus showing that male mixed doubles players tend to be older than female mixed doubles players on average.

In the following plot, for each histogram the number of entries per age has been divided by the total number of entries in that discipline (for mixed treating male and female players seperately), eliminating the influence of the different numbers of entries and giving the relative distribution of ages.

In this plot, it is obvious that women’s singles players are younger than players in other disciplines. Male players in general are older than female players.

Another way to plot this data is to show the cumulative distribution, i.e. the percentages of entries with an age smaller then a given age.

The curve for women’s singles is the first to rise. All curves for female players are to the left of the curves for the male players. The women’s doubles curve is between the curves for singles and mixed doubles. The curves for male players rise at later ages, the differences between the disciplines are not as big as for women.

Conclusion

So as a summary: female players are younger than male players. Singles players are younger than doubles players. Discussing the reasons is beyong the scope of this post, I can only give some guesses. Female players might be younger on average because women’s badminton is not as athletic as men’s badminton, focusing more on technical skills that can already be achieved at younger ages. Moreover some female players might end their career earlier in order to have children. The difference between singles and doubles might be due to the more athletic nature in singles and the more tactical and technical nature of doubles.