Fans have grown to love football players of all shapes and sizes since the game started. Juninho, nicknamed the “Little Fella”, is still a hero at Middlesbrough while 16 stone Adebayo Akinfenwa is piling in the goals this season at AFC Wimbledon.
That’s not to say that weight does not matter as there are different positions and playing styles for which larger or smaller players are better suited.
However, to illustrate the distribution we divided all the players who have their weight listed on the Premier League website (564) into the divisions of a sport where how you measure on the scales is all important - boxing.
The league has everything from 18 players who could only fight as heavyweights (mostly goalkeepers) to one sub-59kg super featherweight - Manchester United starlet Jesse Lingard, in case you were wondering. We cannot see the young midfielder squaring up to Manny Pacquiao any time soon though.
It’s unsurprising that the cruiserweight division is the one with the largest number of players - it does have the biggest gap between its weight limit (90.7kg) and that of the one below (light heavyweight). To give you an idea of who would fit in that class, Evander Holyfield and Britain’s David Haye have both been cruiserweight champions in the past.
The figures tend to vary by playing position and in some cases quite dramatically. The heaviest position by median weight is goalkeeper at 83kg. Given that they tend to be much taller than the average player too, it’s natural that their weight would follow suit.
Defenders and forwards have the exact same median weight of 76kg or about 12 stone. Smaller than everyone though are the Premier League’s midfielders, at a relatively titchy 72kg - or middleweight. Famous players of that size include Manchester United’s Daley Blind and West Brom’s Stephane Sessegnon.
Despite all this, and the fact we have seen this week that football players are sometimes not reluctant to fight with their fists, most of them probably would not make great boxers. Although we would not want to get on the wrong side of either Peter Schmeichel (heavyweight) or Roy Keane (cruiserweight) who were revealed this week to have squared up to each other in the past.
