PETER WEBB from Bet Angel uses stats to try and answer the question…..
As the new season is upon us all football fans up and down the country will no doubt have fresh hopes about what the season will bring. Transfers will have been done and hopes raised. But what is it that makes a team successful? What is the most defining characteristic?
As is well known, a lot of club revenue gets spent on wages to attract top players. This is in the hope that buying talent buys performances. Quite a few years ago I set about trying to predict promotions and relegations and used all sorts of complicated maths to try and work it out before stumbling on the thought that maybe wages were actually correlated to performance. If it was, then the bigger the wage bill the higher the league position and vice versa.
After a lot of data gathering, to cut a long story short, if you look at the Premier League over time, the correlation is very high. I and others quickly worked out that wage bill is a good proxy for league position. Basically, this means that the league pretty much ended up with the lower spending teams near the bottom and the higher spending teams at the top. The big four, not only ended tend to up in the top four, but also had the top four wage bills. What happened to the three teams with the lowest wage bill, typically they were relegated. Going back on my data year after year, excluding exceptionals; the team with the lowest wage bill often finished bottom. This pattern of correlation up and down the league repeats with amazing regularity from season to season.
If you zoom out and look at it from a broader level it’s easy to see how clubs have effectively bought success. I went back over ten years and added up the wage bills for the top five clubs. Ranked by wage bills the clubs come out as follows: –
(1) Chelsea – £1.5bn
(2) Man Utd – £1.23bn
(3) Arsenal – £1.05bn
(4) Liverpool – £1.00bn
(5) Man City – £0.82bn
If you then rank the clubs by average league position over the same period you get the following rankings: –
(1) Man Utd
(2) Chelsea
(3) Arsenal
(4) Liverpool
Man City only started spending recently, so they don’t average out well over ten years just yet. But if you look at the last few years then their expendicture is just short of Chelsea’s. The inevitable conclusion was that if your club owner doesn’t have big pockets it’s unlikely you will ever challenge those that do.
It’s all relative as well. Wage bills have sky rocketed over the years so it’s just not good enough to spend money, you have to spend more money faster than your rivals. If you look at the average weekly wage for a top tier footballer it’s risen 46 fold in 25 years, so unless you can increase your wage bill by that much over the same period then you will be in relative delcine. For lower league teams, wages have only increased just less than five fold during the same period so there is a huge disparity between lower league football and the top tier. Liverpool’s woes can’t really be pinned on management exclusively as their trip from challenging for the league to struggling to qualify for Europe is down to the spending power of their rivals. On the illustration you can see back in the 2002/03 season they were knocking on the door of second biggest spenders but have now slipped to fifth. But this isn’t a result of failure to spend, it’s just others have spent more. That said, over the period in question they were underperformers, but only just.
If you look at variation to likely performance then West Ham stick out as a team who just can’t seem to help doing worse than they should. Next up are Man City who even a few years ago, when spending levels were ‘normal’, still underperformed. Newcastle and Sunderland also rank highly in terms of failing to get a return on their spending. Overall under-performers tend to be clustered outside the top four to mid ranking spenders for some reason; I’ll need to do more research to understand why. Over-performers tend to lurk in the lower part of the league. In the middle it all averages out a fair bit and becomes a battle for points, consistancy and mid table obscurity.
Every year you do tend to get one large over or under performer though, but in general it seems that money does buy success! The advantage of this is that it allows you to, generally, forecast longer term success or failure of a club. Wages appear to be a good proxy for generally how well a club should perform. Arsenal have the most stable business model in the premier league as it stands and this could see them return, in relative terms, to nearer the top of the league subject to the financial fair play rules and their implementation. This also has important ramifications for how you should asses a manager’s performance and prospects. If we look at relative performance we can even out the playing field and see who really is achieving above their means.
Surprised by Moyes appointment to Manchester United? You shouldn’t have been. Over the ten years we looked at, Everton had the ninth highest wage bill. But they finished, on average, the sixth highest of the sampled teams. Though curiously, their average league position was 9th.
So how best can you use all this information?
From a betting or trading perspective it’s useful to know, as it will allow you to anticpate if a team is performing above or below expectations. Also, you can tell if a team is likley to recover or lose points as the season progresses.I like playing in the promotion and relegation markets on this basis. You can pick up some real value from taking positions throughout the season and letting things pan out, as expected.
Before the start of each season and during the season you can watch the news flow coming from each club. If the club is struggling financially then it is certain that their prospects for doing well in the league will diminish. If a team has a bottomless pit of money then it will most likely improve prospects. New managers can wipe the slate clean and kick start the team back to their appropriate level, but there is little evidence they can get them to perform far above it. Popular managers that resign can have the opposing effect. Thanks to betting exchanges you can take advantage of temporarily success or failure by backing or laying a team and trading out when they regress to their rightful place in the league. But you may also be willing to take longer term positions and benefit from increasing certainty or uncertainty as the season progresses.
At a core level, the economics behind football are pretty horrible. Costs, mainly wage related, are so high that aspiring football clubs often have to sell their best players just to stay afloat. But selling your best players will probably lead to poorer results; it’s a catch 22 situation. This can be very frustrating for fans that have seen somebody come up through the ranks only to see them sold off to a rival. It seems that the big clubs regularly buy up the best players from smaller teams, thereby retaining a fierce strangehold on talent. With few restrictions in place, there seems nothing other than money to stop them from doing this.
With that in mind, try and have realistic expectations, but more importantly enjoy the coming football season!
Bet Angel contains a number of features designed to specifically aid your chances of successfully betting or trading on all sports markets and is available on a free trial – Visit www.betangel.com for more information.
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