As an economist, I tend to focus on the small details and we use a lot of measures such as 'marginal cost' to analyse a company or something. This frame of mind got me thinking about the following -
"How much does a club effectively pay to accumulate one league point?"
I'm also quite a fan of the NFL and one of the things that I have took away from American Football is their constant focus on player performance and all of the measures they have created in order to analyse how successful a player, or a team, is during a season.
So what I've done is created a measure, "effective player cost per league point" which indicates the club's player wage bill as a ratio to the points they managed to accumulate that season. For example, my measure shows it cost Derby County £203,000 a year in player wages to get one point in the Championship 11/12.
So here's the graph, and I'll add the league table with the raw data just below.
It's a shame that the wage bill data for Pompey and Coventry isn't available but I still think there's a few things to point out.
Firstly, Blackpool's effective wage cost per league point of £165,000 is the stand out figure. Doncaster, who were relegated with just 36 points, had an effective wage cost of £261,000. Birmingham City spent over twice as much on player salaries and managed to accumulate just one more point. Think it shows just how well Blackpool did to make it into the play-offs.
West Ham, who were relegated the season before but managed to make it back to the EPL through the play-offs, had both the highest annual wage bill (£41.6m) and highest effective cost per league point (£484,000).
At the moment I'm not too sure how much focus to give the measure, but it's certainly interesting. Would love to hear your comments in the box below.
-- Jack
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