Competitive balance in the English Premier League

Abstract

The paper explores competitive balance in the top tier of English league football during the era of the Premier League. This era is compared with both the preceding twenty-five year period and also with the era before World War I. Using several statistical measures, the analysis shows that the current high levels of competitive imbalance are not new phenomena. An explanation is proffered in terms of unequal resources between clubs which are inherent to the ‘longue durée’ of professional league football in England.

Keywords:

• Competitive balance
• English football (soccer)
• statistical measures of concentration

Notes

Notes

1 Blackburn never quite lived up to the scale of Walker’s ambitions. Even in their Premier League Championship season in 1994/5 attendances only averaged 25,277. Fans also proved surprisingly reluctant to attend subsequent Champions’ League fixtures (see Jackman, 2009).

2 Deloitte estimated Abramovich’s expenditure at Chelsea to be around £900m and Mansour’s at Manchester City at around £835m (Deloitte, 2013, 64).

3 The measure used by Deloitte is the Spearman rank order correlation ‘rho’. This is a nonparametric measure of statistical dependence between two variables. It assesses how well the relationship between two variables can be described using a monotonic function. If there are no repeated data values, a perfect Spearman correlation of ± 1 occurs when each of the variables is a perfect monotone function of the other.

4 See Braudel (1949), Duby (1973) and Le Goff (1990).

5 From 1992 until 1997, only one English team entered the Champions’ League. In the 1997/8 and 1998/9 seasons, two teams entered and after 1999 three teams were eligible until the 2002/3 season. Since then, four teams have entered the Champions’ League. The 2017-2018 season witnessed five teams in the Champions League for the first time. Manchester United qualified additionally on the basis of winning the Europa League in May 2017.

6 Christmas and New Year fixtures often coincided with games against geographically proximate teams.

7 T. Sydney – a director of Wolverhampton Wanderers – argued that competitive balance was the result of the imposition of the maximum wage which “had worked well because clubs were of a much more equal playing strength” (cited in Vamplew, 1988, 136).

8 Taylor (2008, 72) reported that ‘58 leading professional clubs in England….moved to new grounds between 1889 and 1910’. Korr (1986, 15) outlined in detail West Ham United’s huge investment in their new Boleyn Ground between 1911 and 1913.

9 In 1911 the club purchased Jock Simpson from Falkirk for £1800, in 1913 they bought Danny Shea from West Ham United for £2000 and in 1914 they paid £2500 for Percy Dawes from Heart of Midlothian.

10 Sources: Pead, 1986; Ross & Smailes, 1993; Endlar, 2007; Jackman, 2009 and Marland, 2011.

11 In the two figures a best line of fit has been superimposed. Both lines are cubic polynomials which represent the smoothest fit.