Revealed: How Pep Guardiola’s influence has led to Premier League footballers getting SMALLER… with teams opting to ditch the traditional ‘English’ playing style

Premier League footballers are getting smaller – and experts think it’s because teams are ditching the traditional ‘English’ playing style.

During the top-tier’s inaugural season 1992 season, players stood 180.6cm tall, on average. Growth continued until 2011, when heights peaked at 183.1cm (6ft 0.09inches).

Since then, however, frames have shrunk. Last year’s Premier League squads sat at 182.5cm (5ft 11.8in).

John Williams, associate professor of sociology at the University of Leicester and author of ‘Football Nation: Sixty Years of the Beautiful Game’, told MailOnline the trend points towards the ‘English game’ becoming less English.

‘Before the Premier League came along there was an established British playing style, one that still favoured directness and physicality over intelligent movement, pace and cleverness,’ he said.

‘As more foreign players started to play over here – and as approaches to refereeing also changed – the dominant style of the English game visibly changed, too.’

Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola has been credited with re-inventing the English game

Williams added that the possession-based, nuanced brand of football used by Manchester City’s superstar manager Pep Guardiola to win five out of the last six Premier League titles cannot be ignored.

‘Under the influence of Pep and others, the general pace of the game has slowed,’ he said.

‘It has become much more possession-based. Foreign players became fitter and stronger too, so the “old” British approaches were no longer so distinctive or so effective.’

Last season, Manchester City earned their sixth title in the last seven seasons.

This is with a squad that ranked in the bottom half of the tallest teams for that season – 13th with an average height of 181.4cm (5ft 11.4 in).

That includes the club’s 195cm (6ft 4in) Norwegian giant and league top scorer, Erling Haaland.

‘Successful clubs are now required to be cleverer: to attack in different, much more complex ways, and the Andy Carrolls of this world now feel out of time,’ Williams said.

‘Perhaps they will return in time – after all, even City have their man Haaland.’

Guardiola has won six Premier League titles with Manchester City – and four back-to-back

Costel Pantilimon won a Premier League champions medal with Manchester City in 2014

Shrinking frames of Premier League players reflects the trend among the general world population.

University of Oxford-backed Our World In Data shows that the average height of men at the age of 18 peaked with those born in 1980 at 171.8cm (5ft 6.3in).

The average height of 18 year-olds born after 1980 has thereafter decreased, albeit gradually, year-on-year down to 171.28cm (5ft 6in).

MailOnline analysed the heights of every player to step on a Premier League field season by season via data collected by worldfootball.net, before segmenting and visualising the data by club, player and height ranges.

Romanian goalkeeper Costel Pantilimon, who notched 54 appearances between 2011 and 2019, is the tallest player in Premier League history, standing at 203cm (6ft 7.9in) tall.

Pantilimon’s time between the sticks for Manchester City, Sunderland and Watford saw him keep 17 clean sheets.

Of the Premier League’s crop of famous shortest players, the most notable might be former Tottenham Hotspur and Burnley FC stalwart Aaron Lennon at 165cm (5ft 4.6in).

Lennon made his league debut for Leeds United in the 2003-04 season, becoming the then-youngest player in the competition’s history at 16 years, 129 days.

Slightly shorter than Lennon at 165cm (5ft 4.1in) is Honduran striker Milton Nunez, a name that has gone down in Sunderland folklore.

Aaron Lennon, standing just under 5ft 5 inches tall, enjoyed a 15-year Premier League career

Milton Nunez, pictured above for Honduras, spent only one season in the Premier League

Nunez made just one appearance for the ‘Black Cats’ in the 1999-2000 season, owing to the fact that then-manager Peter Reid had signed him by accident, meaning to bring on board Nunez’s compatriot at Greek club PAOK, Adolfo Valencia.

But wearing the crown of the shortest player to don a Premier League jersey is midfielder Matty Holmes.

The Luton-born midfielder enjoyed spells at West Ham, Blackburn Rovers and Charlton Athletic from 1992-2000 at 163cm (5ft 3.7in).

Holmes’ career was brutally cut short after a reckless challenge from Wolverhampton Wanderers defender Kevin Muscat badly broke the Englishman’s leg.