Pep's carousel

[Gnegneri]

It rotates.


The percentages below are the amount of games started by a player over the whole season (37 games for the league as the official site didn't work with game 36). Percentages are in red when a player started less than 1/3 of the games, percentages are in green when he started more than 1/3 of the games, percentages are in white when he started more than 3/4 of the games.

I took the 1/3 threshold as I think some players certainly play more so 1/2 threshold was too high too reach in this type of policy. I also only took the League and the Champions League, inserting the Copa would bend it too much into the favour of rotation as teh Copa is known for that. I only considered starters, players like Thiago got a substitution but never started so.

League: (The 1's are player's that start in that game.)

We started 21 players throughout the year. 15 of them started 12 games or more, 5 of them (excluding Valdes of course) started more than 3/4 of the games.

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Champions League:

We started 18 players throughout the year. 14 of them started 4 games or more, 7 of them (excluding Valdes of course) started 3/4 or more games.

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Total:

6 players did not make the 1/3 barrier in total:
Bojan: First teamer, still young, but we all agree he should get some more playing time.
Chyg: New player, struggled giganticly
Rafa: First teamer but having a bad season, could have done better.
Jona: Youth player, pure logic he didn't reach it.
Milito: Injured till halfway the season, pure logic he didn't reach it.
Jeffren: Back-up player, pure logic he didn't reach it.

So out of the 6 that didn't make it in total, 4 have an excuse, 1 had a bad season and the other one needs more time.

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So how does this relate to availabilty? I checked the squads on the official site but did not take discardings by Pep from the squad into account, the player is either in or out the squad (be it exclusion, suspension, injury). Same procedure:

The percentages below are the amount of the player started games over the whole season (37 games for the league as the official site didn't work with game 36). Percentages are in red when a player started less than 1/3 of the games, percentages are in green when he started more than 1/3 of the games, percentages are in white when he started more than 3/4 of the games. Squad inclusions are light blue. Substitutes playing 15 minutes or more are purple.

League:

We started 21 players throughout the year. 18 of them started 12 games or more when available, 7 of them (excluding Valdes of course) started more than 3/4 of the games.

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We started 18 players throughout the year. 15 of them started 4 games or more when available, 9 of them (excluding Valdes of course) started more than 3/4 of the games.

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Total:

4 players did not make the 1/3 barrier in total:
Bojan: First teamer, still young, but we all agree he should get some more playing time.
Rafa: First teamer but having a bad season, could have done better.
Jona: Youth player, pure logic he didn't reach it.
Jeffren: Back-up player, pure logic he didn't reach it.

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Now, why I included those substitutes:

4 outfield players with a near 100% playing time (start or at least 15 minutes as a sub) when available: Alves, Piqué, Messi, Xavi. (this makes it difficult for others to reach high percentages)

The ones that didn't reach high numbers:
Bojan: I know
Chyg: struggling
Tits: not good enough overall
Rafa: not good enough overall
Jona: too young
Milito: injury
Jeffren: too young/not good enough overall

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My conclusion is that Pep rotates around a core with the players that do fine. The ones that didn't feature a lot all had a valid excuse bar Bojan. Don't forget we have one of the smallest squads of the top teams, making it hard to rotate when that squad contains Chygs, Tits or Jeffrens. Plus in the first half of the season, there wasn't one line-up the same if I'm not mistaken.

Pep rotates, but not fully and only with the small amount of players he has available. But our squad is too small to be a diehard rotator.

 

[Hamzah]

alot of effort went into this

 

[maz]

Hey man, I just had an Excel orgasm. That's really interesting to see. Valdes, Pique, Xavi and Alves are almost-100% mainstays in the squad, with Messi not being far behind. That means that of the other 6 players, Pep has really used the rotation to full effect. Surely Busquets and Pedro will get more starts next season (even though Busi is already on 70%). So you can see why Pep isn't looking to add to the squad too much. You can see from the fourth table that we had several instances of players missing 3+ games in a row, particularly during the end of the season, yet we still finished the season strongly. Also Milito, Alves and Yayá missed chunks of the season (in different amounts), yet we managed to cover for them. Pep has done a great job, making use of the squad at his disposal. He has his favoured starters, but he puts confidence in the rest of the squad.

And so have you, Gneg!

alot of effort went into this

Then at least say something about it!

 

[barcetia]

wow. speechless gneg.
thank you.
amazing

 

[maz]

One interesting thing is the little amount of faith Pep showed in Bojan. This is continued from the season before when he brought Pedro on instead of Bojan when we were 2-0 up in the CL final vs Man Utd.

I did think it was a funny choice, as I thought Bojan would be the jewel Pep was grooming, but I've said since the beginning of last season when Bojan started playing again that I don't see him reaching the heights we thought he would. He is an average player, above average at times, but is not the player for Barca. It's sad considering we had hyped him up so much, but when you have players around him improving at a phenominal rate, Bojan's lack of improvement really shows.

 

[Barcaman]

I think Bojan had better strike rate than Zlatan and clearly showed he is Barca material when he stepped in. Had he played minutes Zlatan had who knows what would have happened.

Nice work but the injuries factor is grossly underrated. For example how much would Maxwell have played if Abidal was fit. Same goes for the rest. So if he played Max then it´s not called rotation obviously.
Also, when we speak of rotations 99% of time we mean in context of giving others a rest not a such of dip of form where pep is forced to bench someone (like we had with Zlatan).
Pep is simply not fond of rotations if he isn´t forced to. Valdes, Pique, Puyol, Alves, Abidal, Xavi, Iniesta, Messi and Zlatan (up to May) practically played whenever they were fit bar rare occasions.

 

[maz]

Having an adequate player to replace is the perfect instance of rotation. Before Abidal got injured, he had started 13 of the 20 games, and Maxwell had started 7. The rotation between the two meant Maxwell was fresh enough to come in and replace Abidal, but wasn't out of form.

 

[el tren]

Interesting analysis. I did sth similar for the 08/09 season.

About the rotation: we never had backups for Alves and Xavi w/out losing a lot on quality. Puyol just cant recplace Alves as attacking fullback/wingback and no one matches Xavi even closely (which is why we desperately need Cesc). Messi just wants to play as much as possible, he just hardly accepts being rotated out, even when playing vs subpar league teams. Also, with Henry in shit form and Iniesta being injured regularly, there werent many options left as Pedro, while being his natural replacement, often started on the left already. And then Chryg was never able to back Pique qualitywise as well.

 

[Barcaman]

One started half what the other had. Btw. Abidal was unavailable to play on 2 matches up to that long term injury so the equation is not that simple.

 

[yusuf]

bojan needs to get more time, he is quality and his strike rate proves that

 

[maz]

One started half what the other had. Btw. Abidal was unavailable to play on 2 matches up to that long term injury so the equation is not that simple.

Rotation doesn't mean an equal amount of games each. It means not only bringing someone in when the other player is unavailable. Abidal played more games than Maxwell at LB, but there was definite rotation between the two.

 

[Barcaman]

Rotation is not when player A has to step in when player B is injured. And certainly not in context we were discussing lately in regards to Bojan, Villa etc.
And while I could be convinced with Abidal there are still 7 others players that practically played whenever they could.

 

[Hamzah]

basically this shows our squad is very good for its size.

Rotation is not when player A has to step in when player B is injured. And certainly not in context we were discussing lately in regards to Bojan, Villa etc.
And while I could be convinced with Abidal there are still 7 others players that practically played whenever they could.

yeah. unlike peps first year when he did have a proper rotation policy so every player would miss one game out of each month if i remember

 

[DaniAlves]

Very interesting, thank you gneg!

 

[Barcafan 2304]

My head hurts