Football
Stephan Uersfeld, Germany correspondent 7y

Bundesliga study shows players stay at clubs for less than 2 years on average

Bundesliga players stay at their respective clubs for an average of 1.95 years, a kicker study has revealed.

For the 2017-18 season, 471 players are contracted to the 18 clubs in Germany's top flight.

A study by kicker has shown that only six of those clubs can retain a player on average for longer than two seasons, with the average length of stay for players 1.95 years.

German champions Bayern Munich, whose long-serving squad members include Manuel Neuer, David Alaba, Thomas Muller, Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery, top the list with an average stay for players of 3.28 years.

They are followed by Borussia Dortmund, whose squad members have been at the club for an average of 2.64 years despite consecutive summers of upheavals. Dortmund also have the longest-serving player in Roman Weidenfeller, with the 37-year-old joining from Kaiserslautern in the summer of 2002.

Borussia Monchengladbach, Bayer Leverkusen, Hertha Berlin and Cologne are the only other four squads to boast an average length of stay of over two years for players, while at the other end of the ranking, newly promoted Stuttgart sit bottom with an average stay of just 1.03 years.

Wolfsburg, who cited "stagnation in the development of our largely newly assembled squad" when sacking coach Andries Jonker on Monday, also sit near the bottom of the list with an average stay of 1.34 years.

"It's just normal that you'd have more fluctuation when battling against relegation," former Bremen sporting executive Thomas Eichin told kicker. "When there is a new coach, he also has other ideas."

Kicker also ran down the last seven transfer periods. Beginning with the summer of 2014, Bayern sold and bought 29 players each, while Mainz had more than double that with 59 incoming and 58 outgoing transfers.

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