Generations

In a recent article for ESPN, Zonal Marking's Michael Cox reviewed the previous generations of England players, their appearances for the national side and the trophies won by their respective clubs, and determined that the Roy Hodgson's side have lost a generation of players born from 1982-1988, with only goalkeeper Joe Hart and striker (and captain) Wayne Rooney emerging as top class players from the internationals born in that generation.

As well as compiling appearance data for Irish players at club level, we also analyse the same data for the international side, so we've compared the total appearances for each generation of players to determine the golden and lost generations for the boys in green. Since the birthdates of some of the earliest players of the Republic of Ireland are unknown, we limited the study to players born after 1st January 1957, beginning with Davey Langan (b. 2nd February 1957), and defined a generation as six years, similar to the numbers used by Zonal Marking in the original article.

Generation	Players	Caps	Avg. Caps
1957 – 1962	38	938	24.68
1963 – 1968	22	527	23.95
1969 – 1974	20	657	32.85
1975 – 1980	35	1093	31.22
1981 – 1986	45	851	18.91
1987 – 1992	28	387	13.82

As you can see in the table above, players born between 1975 and 1980 acquired the most caps. This generation includes four players from the top six international appearances for the Republic - Robbie Keane, Shay Given, Kevin Kilbane and Damien Duff.

The previous generation produced the fewest number of players, giving the corollary of the highest average caps per player to the internationals born between 1969 and 1974. This includes Ireland's first centurion Steve Staunton and legendary players like Roy Keane, Kenny Cunningham and Gary Breen.

Either of these could arguably be crowned the "golden generation", although we favour the players born in 1969-1974, even with the lower numbers of internationals born in this era, it still led to a large proportion of high quality players.

While the most recent generation have the lowest number of total caps, and the lowest average, the majority of players have not yet retired. The oldest players (born in 1987) are still only 28, and can probably look forward to at least another 4 years of international football, so we've dismissed them for the time being.

Finally, we come to the internationals born between 1981 and 1986. This is the first generation in the study to average less than 20 caps per player. Of the 45 players born in these years, more than half (24) have less than ten caps, more internationals than were born between 1969 and 1974! This includes players like Graham Barrett and Thomas Butler, both of whom had serious injury problems throughout their careers that limited their international appearances. But what happened the rest of this lost generation? Why did so many slip between the cracks? Was it just bad luck due to injury? Were too many caps handed out to sub standard players, or were they called up in the first place because there wasn't the quality available to previous generations? And possibly most important of all - has the FAI learned from this, or will the same mistake be made with the following generation?

Further Reading
England hoping to avoid past mistakes with new generation