The most common top-flight career lasts one game

The Premier League's single-appearance players are not a tiny curiosity tucked away at the bottom. At 389 they come close to matching the 489 players who reached two hundred games, and the drop from one appearance to two is steep: 212 players finished on two, 160 on three, 127 on four. The single game is not just the most common outcome, it is nearly twice as common as the next one.

Only four of those 389 scored in their one match, which tells you something about the kind of appearance it usually was. These are rarely ninety-minute starts in a contested fixture. Far more often they are late substitutions, end-of-season run-outs once the table is settled, or a debut handed to someone whose club already had other plans for him.

Across the five leagues the figures are close: 426 in Serie A, 389 in England, 388 in La Liga, 290 in Scotland and 289 in the Bundesliga. The German figure is the lowest, though mainly because an eighteen-club league has fewer players passing through it: as a share of everyone who played, the Bundesliga's one-game careers run at almost exactly the English rate.

Serie A's total is the one that stands out. It has the most single-game careers of the five and the lowest median of the four big leagues, 28 games. Italian clubs have long used large squads and a busy loan market, and both leave a trail of players who appear once or twice for a club and are then sent elsewhere to develop. The one-game total measures that churn as much as anything.

By listed position, the Premier League's one-game players break down as 135 defenders, 112 midfielders, 100 forwards and 42 goalkeepers. Keepers make up about seven per cent of all players in the competition but nearly eleven per cent of the single-appearance group. That fits the job. A third-choice goalkeeper can sit on a bench for three seasons and play only when the first two are injured, suspended or rested for a dead rubber.

The outfield players in this group come from a few recognisable places. There are academy graduates given one game as a reward or a test, who then drop down the divisions and build perfectly good careers elsewhere. There are loan signings and short-term arrivals who played once before an injury or a change of manager. And there are players at relegated clubs who were blooded in the final weeks and then never returned to the top flight.

What they share is that the one appearance tells you almost nothing about them as footballers. Plenty went on to hundreds of games in the Championship or abroad. The number is a measure of opportunity in one competition, not of ability.

Climb up from the bottom and the Premier League distribution runs like this: 949 players on two to nine games, 1,756 on ten to forty-nine, 792 on fifty to ninety-nine. Only 759 sit between one hundred and one hundred and ninety-nine, and 489 have reached two hundred. Put together, 24 per cent of everyone who has played in the competition reached a hundred appearances.

That minority does nearly all of the work. Players with a hundred or more games account for about seventy per cent of every Premier League appearance ever made. The other three-quarters of the player pool share the remaining thirty per cent between them, mostly in short spells.

Set against that, the single-appearance players barely register. Their 389 games are a little under one in nine hundred of the 355,829 Premier League appearances in the record. They make up nearly eight per cent of the people, and almost none of the football.

In the other big leagues the share reaching a hundred is similar, 23 per cent in Serie A, 22 in La Liga and 21 in the Bundesliga, and the medians sit between 28 and 32 games. The structure of a top-flight career, short for most and long for a few, looks much the same wherever you measure it.

Scotland is the exception. Its median career is 24 games, eight fewer than England's, and only 16 per cent of Scottish Premiership players reach a hundred. The bottom of the distribution is also wider: 885 of its 4,028 players finished on two to nine games, about 22 per cent, against 18 per cent in the Premier League.

Two features of the Scottish game probably account for most of it. A small top flight with automatic relegation moves clubs, and with them whole squads, in and out regularly, so a player at a promoted side may get one season and then drop. And the better players in a Scottish squad are often sold, frequently to England, before their totals have time to build. Both cut careers short in the record without saying anything about how long the player actually kept going.

There is a playing lesson in all of this for Higher or Lower on appearances. A player you barely know, especially one from a club that came up and went straight back down, is far more likely to sit under thirty games than over it. Calling lower on the obscure name and higher on the one you remember being a regular is a crude rule, but the distribution is so bottom-heavy that it holds for longer than it should, particularly in the Scottish rounds.