I was pleased that “Liverpool beat Arsenal”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/4703844.stm last night, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Despite having heard Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson tell us on may occasions (usually apropos Chelsea) that money doesn’t buy success, I’m struck by the “table of 2004 transfer spending”:http://www.footballeconomy.com/stats/stats_turnover_10.htm for English PL clubs on the “Political Economy of Football”:http://www.footballeconomy.com/index.htm site. Here are the top spenders:
1. Chelsea
2. ManYoo
3. Liverpool
4. Tottenham
5. Arsenal
and the rank ordering of the “Premiership today”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/table/default.stm after 26 games?
1. Chelsea
2. ManYoo
3. Liverpool
4. Tottenham
5. Arsenal
The correlation breaks down somewhat further down the table, but still.
{ 32 comments }
des von bladet 02.15.06 at 6:47 am
You’ve silently introduced a new variable — the timelag, here approximately two (2) years. You need more than one (1) datapoint to establish with more certainty than passing cuteness that that holds.
(If someone offers me a source of data I could be persuaded to come out of time-series analysis retirement to look into this.)
Matthew 02.15.06 at 6:57 am
There are two years data points, and the second doesn’t conform so nicely, particuarly as Arsenal spent just 4m and finished second. That might be showing now though – perhaps you’d need a value of squad or at least a few years of data.
That’s a good site though (although it needs a bit of updating). Why do you think football players wages are quoted ‘per week’ rather than ‘per year’. Is it a legacy of football’s history as a working-class game, with a maximum wages cap per week, and wages not paid in the close season? Or is it because it makes the amounts looks less out-of-this-world?
Chris Bertram 02.15.06 at 6:58 am
Hmm. 2004 finished just over 13 months ago, and I think some timelag is reasonable as players take time to “bed down” and fit into a system. But I take your point of course.
Carlos 02.15.06 at 7:39 am
You do know that of all the professional sports studied for this, socker has the highest correlation between money spent and team performance, right? (And out of the leagues studied, Italian socker is the worst.)
On the other hand, US gridiron has the lowest correlation. [1]
If I were a good leftie, would I be watching a spectacle that was not only owned by plutocrats, but manipulated in the standings by them as well? Or would I be watching the real thing?
[1] references are in Andrew Zimbalist’s May the Best Team Win, my copy of which is in the bottom box in the storage closet. But libraries exist! I think.
Daniel 02.15.06 at 7:40 am
I have no idea why Hansen and Lawrenson keep saying this. It’s not as if the subject hasn’t been studied, exhaustively and the conclusion is yes you can.
des von bladet 02.15.06 at 7:44 am
Real Madrid, anyone?
soru 02.15.06 at 8:11 am
On the other hand, US gridiron has the lowest correlation.
This is, of course, because it is heavily regulated with the goal of ensuring balanced on-field competition: nothing like a free market in players exists.
It is something of a political/cultural mystery that the ‘draft pick’ system somehow remains legal – in any other are of US life, a lawyer defending it would be laughed at in court.
soru
Neil 02.15.06 at 8:11 am
Carlos, what this shows is not that plutocrats are more involved, or with different intentions, in football than in gridiron. It shows that in football money can buy success more reliably than in other sports. (Aside – how is that manipulation? Does the US manipulate the Olympic games by spending so much on coaching?) Now what does that tell you? That there is a stricter relationship between identifiable skills of players and success – which seems to me good evidence that the skill/luck tradeoff favors the first more in football than in other team sports.
Carlos 02.15.06 at 9:52 am
Actually, Neil, Soru’s analysis is correct. It’s not that skill is less identifiable in gridiron than in socker — I’ll call it calcio, if you prefer, but please, it’s not the only ‘football’, unless you have a vested interest in pissing off 350 million people (which is possible). It’s that the NFL is a cartel which regulates balance of play through numerous internal processes.
(Still doesn’t make the penalty-shootout game any sillier. But hey, some people find the two-minute drill boring.)
Neil 02.15.06 at 10:28 am
Caros, Soru’s analysis may be part of the picture. But it can’t explain the fact that – according to you – football (yes, I want to piss off 350 mill; seems better than pissing off 5 billion) is on the top of the table of all team sports. Soru may have identified a factor that keeps gridiron lower on this table than, say, gaelic football or rugby union.
I won’t defend the penalty shootout. Notice, though that precisely 0% of PL matches are decided on penalties.
reuben 02.15.06 at 10:51 am
Now what does that tell you? That there is a stricter relationship between identifiable skills of players and success – which seems to me good evidence that the skill/luck tradeoff favors the first more in football than in other team sports.
Hmm. But isn’t the big difference in gridiron the fact that there are cartel-driven factors militating against the primacy of the ability to achieve success via identifying skill? I may be wrong about this, but my understanding is that the NFL got a lot more balanced (from top to bottom) when revenue sharing and salary caps came into play. By your theory, if I’m understanding it correctly, this balance came about because the people running the teams somehow suddenly found themselves less capable of identifying the skills they needed to win big and win often. But isn’t it more likely that they still have the capacity to identify these skills but, unlike Chelsea, are prevented by cartel regulations from maximising this capacity?
Or am I misunderstanding you?
Either way (and more importantly), Chelsea are clearly mudding down their pitch to make things more difficult for Barca. How embarrassing – they should be penalised a million quid a match until they fix what is probably the worst pitch in the PL.
Neil 02.15.06 at 10:57 am
Reuben, I know nothing about american football. As I said to Carlos, though there may be factors explaining gridiron’s position relative to the other oval ball games, it’s the place of football on the top of the table that interests me. My claim is that of these sports, football is the one in which skill matters most.
Agree with you on the relative importance of this claim versus Chelsea’s pitch (if your claim is true).
soru 02.15.06 at 11:54 am
My claim is that of these sports, football is the one in which skill matters most.
well, these researchers disagree:
http://cnls.lanl.gov/~ebn/pubs/sports/html/
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from season-end standings data and quantify the predictability of games by the frequency of upsets from game results data. We introduce a mathematical model in which the underdog team wins with a fixed upset probability. This model quantitatively relates the parity among teams with the predictability of the games, and it can be used to estimate the upset frequency from standings data. We propose the likelihood of upsets as a measure of competitiveness
They go on to conclude soccer has more upsets, more randomness, than the other team sports they looked at.
The apparent contradiction between that and the info in the main post is probably best explained by the sheer amount of money currently being pumped into the top premiership clubs managing to swamp the innate unpredictability of the game.
soru
Carlos 02.15.06 at 12:05 pm
Neil, five billion? Dude. There are large parts of the world where socker is *nothing*, less than it is in the States.
Anyway, you haven’t bothered to inform yourself about several aspects of this discussion, so there’s no point in talking with you further.
nick s 02.15.06 at 2:58 pm
I have no idea why Hansen and Lawrenson keep saying this. It’s not as if the subject hasn’t been studied, exhaustively and the conclusion is yes you can.
The only issue is whether one can buy continued success: Blackburn’s injection of Walker millions got them one championship, but that success was short-lived. Leeds’s fate also shows that if a side relies upon transfer investment to pay for itself in terms of the revenue that comes from success, particularly in the Champions League.
(I’ll also note that after splashing out, Steve Gibson’s investment in the late 90s got him two losing cup final appearances and relegation.)
Chelsea’s position is somewhat similar to Liverpool’s in the 80s: that is, they can not only afford to buy players to create a successful team; they also ensure that other teams don’t have the players that they stick on the bench. They certainly don’t need to sell players, although they do loan a few; you have to credit Mourinho for creating a squad where there’s apparently not much dissatisfaction among players who don’t get regular first team appearances.
elton 02.15.06 at 5:15 pm
It’s not (only) so much Chelsky’s spending power when it comes to buying players, but perhaps more importantly how much you can spend on wages.
That’s why Chelsea can afford to have such a large squad of 14-16 top-class players, whereas even Arsenal or Liverpool have to concentrate on perhaps only 5-7 high-wage top-class players. Over a long season (with injuries, suspensions, loss of form and fitness) this makes a huge difference.
Moreover, transfer spending alone is also not very persuasive as you need to look at net transfer spending. Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger, for example, managed to spend roughly as much as he sold until 2004.
But the overall point is valid: I remember a study by Deloitte, quoted in The Economist a year or two ago, which showed that roughly 75-80% of success can be explained by money in the Premier League in the 1990s.
derrida derider 02.15.06 at 6:16 pm
“They go on to conclude soccer has more upsets, more randomness, than the other team sports they looked at.” – soru
Of course it does – any extremely low scoring game where scoring has a very sparse distribution will tend to have more upset wins than a higher scoring game. IOW, it’s quite possible to fluke a 1-0 win even if you’ve been outplayed all day but you’re very unlikely to fluke a 49-48 win if you’ve been consistently outplayed.
Which is one of several reasons (including those dreadful penalty shootouts) why soccer needs to eliminate its offside rule, as field hockey did some years ago with terrific results.
John Quiggin 02.15.06 at 6:45 pm
The effect of not having salary caps is not to change the frequency of upsets, but to ensure that the same teams are favourites for decades at a stretch. Scotland seems to be an extreme example if this.
Ben P 02.15.06 at 6:58 pm
Carlos, this may or may not be true. Football isn’t that popular in the US and India, but it has a significant following in both countries. I can’t think of many other places where it isn’t a major sport.
But football (“soccer”) is clearly the world’s most popular sport.
elton 02.15.06 at 9:08 pm
Annual Income 2004/05
1(2) Real Madrid £186.2m
2(1) Man Utd £166.4m
3(3) AC Milan £158m
4(5) Juventus £154.9m
5(4) Chelsea £149.1m
6(7) Barcelona £140.4m
7(9) Bayern Munich £128m
8(10) Liverpool £122.4m
9(8) Inter Milan £119.7m
10(6) Arsenal £115.7m
11(12) Roma £89m
12(11) Newcastle £87.1m
13(14) Spurs £70.6m
14(17) Schalke £65.8m
15(-) Lyon £62.7m
16(13) Celtic £62.6m
17(16) Man City £60.9m
18(-) Everton £60m
19(-) Valencia £57.2m
20(15) Lazio £56.1m
Source: Deloitte (Previous season’s positions in brackets)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4716174.stm
dr ngo 02.16.06 at 12:38 am
On the gridiron side of things, perhaps it should be noted that in the interest of “parity” the NFL (as a cartel) not only has salary caps and the draft, but has deliberately arranged that the schedule for the following season will favor teams with losing records this season. (They play fewer opponents with winning records, in effect.) I know of no other sport that has so consciously distorted free competition in favor of balanced competition, and to that extent it is literally incomparable with soccer.
John Quiggin 02.16.06 at 5:14 am
I checked the stats for Scotland, and to a 90 per cent approximation, Celtic/Rangers always win and always have done. The other teams seem to play the role of the Washington Generals/New York Nationals as against the Harlem Globetrotters (they win sometimes, but almost never).
How does this work? Who would support a team that hasn’t won a premiership in 100 years of participation, and almost certainly won’t win one in the next 100? There have been some long droughts in Australian Football, but at least there is some hope for the future.
Who would go to watch a game between two such teams? And what’s the point of a season-length competition which, at best, produces a runner-up to whichever of Celtic/Rangers wins that year?
reuben 02.16.06 at 5:21 am
soccer needs to eliminate its offside rule, as field hockey did some years ago with terrific results
[Thinking out loud on your proposal:] I like the idea of shaking football up a bit, but not knowing a lot about field hockey, I’m imagining that you can’t go over the top in the same way you can in football, right? Would eliminating the offside rule not encourage teams to leave a striker or two camped near the opponent’s goal, with the defenders just trying to boot it long (towards those camping strikers) every chance they got? Or do you think that a decent centreback (eg Anton, not Rio) could handle this sort of thing 99.9% of the time?
Perhaps it would be even more likely to encourage loads of potshots from 30 metres, with a striker standing by the post waiting to poach bouncebacks. What do you think? Certainly it would increase the intensity and regularity of goalmouth action (a pair of words that gets my vote for greatest term in sport, by the way).
I agree with you 100% about why upsets are more likely in low-scoring sports, by the way – rarity of goals is a different variable than financial capacity. But on that note, it seems that increasing the scoring (which would reduce upsets) might be a terrible thing to do without first decreasing the financial differences between top and bottom. By taking out that low-scoring variable (which makes upsets more likely), we’d have an even more predictable product.
Ray 02.16.06 at 5:37 am
I think most Scottish football fans either support one of the Glasgow clubs or consider themselves to be competing in a league that doesn’t really contain them. In Ireland, afaik, no Ulster team has ever won the Hurling All-Ireland, and there may be counties that have never won the football championship, but it doesn’t stop people from supporting their county. Even if you don’t think you’ll win the big prize, there’s always the hope of getting closer than before, of beating the local rivals or a fancied side.
soru 02.16.06 at 5:51 am
Who would support a team that hasn’t won a premiership in 100 years of participation, and almost certainly won’t win one in the next 100?
One reason is that, because of the random unpredictability of low-scoring football, there is always pretty good chance for most teams to beat one of the big two every few years, and that provides just as much satisfaction as any other sporting success.
There’s also the chance of winning the cup competion, which is effectively a much shorter season, and so even more random.
Of course, the real reason is that they are scottish, not australian. I would barely be surpised to see support for a team drop during a period of good performance, as they would no longer be providing the required dose of gloom.
soru
Neil 02.16.06 at 7:02 am
Though you haven’t said what I haven’t informed myself of (just after making a vague and unsourced empirical claim which has just enough assessable content to be probably false), I have no choice but to withdraw from all further participation. I haven’t done enough research to participate in a comments thread on a blog.
reuben 02.16.06 at 8:27 am
Neil, I just want to say that I disagreed with your original point, but I think Carlos is being sophmoric. Blog comment sections can be conversations; they don’t have to be arguments or pissing contests. If aggro kicks off when talking about politics, well that’s probably inevitable. But on this topic, is it really worth it?
Sigh.
nick s 02.16.06 at 2:21 pm
Who would support a team that hasn’t won a premiership in 100 years of participation, and almost certainly won’t win one in the next 100?
Um, me? (Middlesbrough hadn’t won a major piece of silverware in a century until grabbing the League cup two years ago.)
But, in Scotland, it’s local pride, plus a bit of UEFA largesse. The curve of Scottish attendances is much steeper — the smaller Premier League teams pull in perhaps 4,000 per game — and for the Falkirks and Livingstons, the contest is in staying up, perhaps getting a cup run and/or a place in Europe. Plus, if you’re in Edinburgh, you’re not going to support a Glasgow team.
John Quiggin 02.16.06 at 4:24 pm
The difference I see in the English situation is that there is still a chance, even for weaker teams. The Scottish situation seems to be so thoroughly tied up by Rangers/Celtic as to make any change impossible.
To push it a bit further, Nick, why don’t people in Edinburgh just follow some other sport where their local team might have a chance?
Daniel 02.16.06 at 5:19 pm
Blackburn’s injection of Walker millions got them one championship, but that success was short-lived
Really? They’re still in the Premiership today, which is not bad going for a medium-sized town in Lancashire (which has lots of alternative teams to support; I am always surprised that Yorkshire has so few top-flight teams). Walker actually bought his premiership title incredibly cheaply by the standards of later titles, and I would not at all be surprised if he has ended up making money out of his investment.
(note also that IIRC Walker’s Blackburn title was pre-Bosman, and this changed the economics of football considerably in terms of the balance between investment in transfers and the ongoing cost of salaries).
Ray 02.17.06 at 4:24 am
John, people follow a team in sport X because they enjoy sport X. They follow the local team because they’re the local team. It’s not like picking lottery numbers.
Chris Bertram 02.17.06 at 5:00 am
Daniel, they’ve been relegated (and promoted again) since, and Jack Walker died 5 and half years ago.
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