Messi and IRC- Mohamed Salahuddin

Lionel Messi and IRC

A-  Has anyone thought about why footballers retired early, considering 35 years old is early, well now were going to look at the progress of a footballer during his years, and see if his activity does decrease as he grows older. The stats will be based on his 7^th year, which was when he was at his peak.

B-   I am a huge fan of Lionel Messi, since he first started playing for Barcelona, he has been called the next Maradona who was also a football legend, and not only did Messi follow Diego Maradona’s footsteps, but he’s also surpassing his own icon’s record. Now to get to the point, we all no that skills, speed, and all of the things that involve football involve science, but it also does involve math, the number of goals, the number of minutes played, everything to do with number in football ofcourse relates to math. For the IRC what I will do, is take Lionel Messi’s goal from 2008-2014 and see how progress he has made during his time with Barcelona, what we are about to find out is how much has he improved, and to find out if he had a slip up during one season, or if his performance is decreasing as the years progress, and his age increases. As we all know age is a huge factor on how well a footballer plays.

C-   So now were going to look at his statics in Barcelona, he joined Barcelona’s First team during 2004-2005 season, but it was until 2005-2006 where he was actually a starting player, so we will look at the stats from 2005-2006 but we will be excluding his current year with Barcelona as the season has just begun.

Goals	Years in Barcelona
14	1
16	2
38	3
47	4
53	5
73	6
46	7
41	8

D- 

As we can see the goals are on the left, and the years are on the bottom.

E-   Average Rate of Change

(6,73) & (7,46)

(7-6)/(46-73)= -0.14

(6,73) & (8,41)

(8-6)/(41-73)= -0.0625

(5,53) & (6,73)

(6-5) & (73-53)= 0.05

The calculations as shown for the average rate of change, show that by using the slope of the line between the points, as you can see during his second year his performance started decreasing, but during the third year the slopes started increasing again, but this shows us that since the line went up, between the last year, that means even though he did decrease in terms of goals, at the end of it did increase.

F-   Now as we are heading to the IRC, we chose the points that we want to analyze, so here is the graph.

calculate the IRC

(6,73) & (7,46)

To get the slope we know the formula so, its 46-73/7-6= -27

(5,53) & (6,73)

73-53/6-5= 20

We then get the IRC by adding the following points together and dividing by 2, 

(-27+20)/2 = -3.5

     So we now know that during Lionel Messi’s years as player, he did not improve, in fact his performance decreased, so as we can tell that age does make a difference in football, as Messi did not score his record of 73 goals in the past two years.