Wanted - A 177.38 cm Footballer

Because that's exactly how tall an average Barcelona player is. That and other such fun stuff has been found by The Professional Football Players Observatory in a demographic study for 2011. Some results of this study have been listed and analyzed in this good read in The Guardian.

Only for your comfort, am listing down below some highlights:

• The average height of a footballer in Europe is 181.96cm, up 0.28cm on 2008 with the Premier League the seventh tallest. Barcelona have the shortest side in all of European Football.
• There is an overwhelming tendency for the 11 most picked players in a squad to be shorter than their team-mates
• Manchester United is the most stable club, with players staying an average of 5.71 years
• In 24 of the 36 leagues studied players stayed longer at the four highest ranked clubs than the other sides in the league.
• Only Cypriot clubs have a higher percentage (72.3%) of expatriate players than English clubs (58.4%)

Whether this data will be used by Managers to select players that are ideal or one of Roman or the Arabs will just ask their scientists to use this information to create a footy-monster with ideal demographic characteristics are yet to be seen. But these things are sure fun to know.