Assessing Bayern Munich Playing Time with the addition of Thiago Alcantara

With days of brewing whisperings surrounding the transfer of 22 year old Spanish international Thiago Alcantara from FC Barcelona to FC Bayern on a relatively inexpensive transfer for the future of the Spanish national team. With calls of joy from some quarters to anger in others, the reaction to the original rumors, were varied and showcased the diverse plurality of opinions on the needs of the treble winning FC Bayern squad. Dissent has commonly come in the form of the question, how is everyone on this Bayern team, supposed to see pitch time and still remain happy? Are there enough minutes to go around if you bring in Alcantara? To that end, let's delve into the mathematics of Bayern playing time in the upcoming season.

The 2013/2014 FC Bayern Munich schedule breaks down in the following manner assuming they win the sextuple:

• 34 Bundesliga matches
• 13 UEFA Champions League matches
• 6 DFB Pokal matches
• 2 FIFA Club World Cup matches
• UEFA SuperCup
• DFL SuperCup

57 matches in totality.

Now, let's assume that Bayern plays a 4-2-3-1 or a 4-3-3, and uses 2 substitutions for its 4 attacking players in every match of this season at the 60^th minute. While there are obvious caveats to this decision, it gives us a good place to split the minutes that is true to most game situations, that also makes the math easy. Let's equally split this time among all of the main attacking players on this squad.

As we can see, without adding Thiago Alcantara to the team equally splitting playing time for all players on this squad, gives everyone a little more than 2500 minutes on the field. Of course, we shouldn't expect every player on this list to get equal playing time because 33-year old squad depth piece Claudio Pizarro is on this list. So, let us re-split this time, and give Pizarro half duty.

Now, we're looking at every player earning a little over 2700 minutes, a very respectable amount of minutes.

With that in mind, let's add Thiago Alcantara into the mixture, with Pizarro playing half time.

Every player on the Bayern squad in this simulation plays a little more than 2400 minutes, or 26 starts and 13 substitutions appearances, for 39 appearances during the season. While that may seem a little severe of a downgrade in terms of playing time for the attacking band, especially for a formula that doesn't include any youth attacking development time. To that end, let's even expand this farther, and bring in youth development time. In this case, I assume that youth development will sit at be ¼ time, while still assuming Pizarro plays half time.

In this, we see reduction to 2300 minutes for the attacking players, while the youth players show up at 500 minutes, and Pizarro clings to 800+ minutes of playing time.

So, how does this compare to last season's treble performance? How were the attacking band's minutes allocated?

As we can see, adding Thiago basically just reduces the outrageous amount of playing time Thomas Muller earned last year under Jupp Heynckes, along with bringing down the minutes for 30 year old Frank Ribery. Adding Alcantara and assuming consistent squad rotation, along with youth development, drops a few appearances over a year for players like Kroos or Robben, while benefiting Shaqiri while allowing Frank Ribery the luxury of being rested as he ages. Of course, the reduction in Thomas Muller's playing time is a crime against humanity, and an attack on our pursuit of happiness. Considering Thomas Muller played in excess of 3900 minutes in the 2011/2012 season as well, we should keep our eyes on what happens with Thomas Muller's playing time given the absolute workhorse he has been the last few years.

Obviously, there are some caveots we should talk about. First, this doesn't include time for players like David Alaba or Emre Can who are normally defensive players who do step into attacking positions occasionally, nor does it include time playing in defense for players like Toni Kroos or Thiago. Also, it's built around Guardiola using a system with 4 attacking players while so far this year, he has used a 4-1-4-1 system which utilizes 5 attacking players, rather than the four, and this has a dramatic impact, increasing the minutes per season to almost 2900.

What do you think? Is 2300 minutes a season enough for some of the best players on the planet?