We’ve all seen the recent figures on wages in the Premiership, but which clubs get the most for their money? Here in the States we’d ask who’s getting the best “bang for the buck”. In England, I don’t know what they’d call it. Quality for the quid? Points for the pound? Woot for the wedge? Anyway, I found the most recent player payroll figures by club for the 2006-07 season. I then matched these salary numbers up with the clubs’ point totals from that season’s league play. You might argue that cup tournaments should have a chance to add to that productivity number, but it’s cleaner to ignore it rather than to obsess over how much to weight those non-league matches. Simple point totals offer decent comparability across clubs.
As most anyone would guess, there’s a strong positive relationship between success and payroll. The plot below shows this:
What to me is more interesting, though, is to look at the clubs that appear far above and far below the fitted line. A regression through all 20 observations shows the best fitting straight-line relationship between wages and points. A club that had more points than its wage level alone would have predicted would appear above the line. This is a measure of how effective they were in turning wages into results. Clubs that aren’t so efficient will appear below the line.
Not surprisingly, all the demoted teams last year fell below the line. Another notable underachiever was Newcastle. Money alone doesn’t alleviate boredom, eh Kev? On the other side of the “quality for the quid” spectrum is Man U. They had a whopping 17 points more than their wage level would have suggested. Others that did well by this metric were Spurs, Everton, Bolton and Reading. For the Royals, mean reversion kicked in this year, but that’s another story.
Chelsea is an interesting case. If you squint at the data the right way, you might see a kind of leveling off in Points at higher Wages. If a curved line were fit instead, with Chelsea influencing the fall-off, we’d be showing diminishing marginal productivity. (Does this make you nostalgic for your days in economics, Susan?) NO, answers Susan.
Anyway, even just this simple analysis seems revealing. Of course, I’m predisposed to anything that makes Man U look good.
Guest statistician: Steve
