Soccer

(football)

Soccer fans often obsess over transfer fees, but I think the more interesting measure of value is player wages. There are two main reasons for this: first, player wages are a substantially larger portion of expenditures than are transfer fees. Second, the negotiation of transfer fees includes three parties, the two clubs and the player (though the player usually only has veto power). Wages, on the other hand, are negotiated between two parties and therefore somewhat less ad hoc, though curiosities such as the correlation between age and salary remain.

To illustrate the importance of wages, I have pulled the salary data (from capology, via fbref) for the top 5 leagues from the past 10 years. Below, I plot each team’s yearly wage (in $ because I don’t know the utf-8 for £) versus points per game. We can immediately see the enhanced health/competitiveness of the premier league relative to the other four. In fact, I have plotted the Prem data in linear scale, whereas the others are plotted in log scale because the top club is so financially dominant.

I have also added lines to show the trajectories of the top 4 clubs this year in each league. Some of these trajectories are complicated, but some are easy to interpret. For instance, Union, Lens, Sociedad, and Newcastle are all streaking upwards while Bayern (despite being the 2nd best team in Europe) appear to be in persistent decline. Another interesting exercise is to take a look at the outliers on the good/low cost side and on the bad/high cost side, and I have labeled a few of these.

Another reason I plotted this in linear scale is to show how much of an outlier Chelsea are this season. We sometimes get caught up in ridiculing the club hierarchy, but that should not distract from the fact that this may be the single greatest underperforming season of all time.

Looking at this figure, we might think that La Liga is one of the more stable leagues. There appears to be a continuous gradient in colors from left to right.

When the Old Lady takes a tumble…

You have to admire the inexorable march of the Bayern wage bill.

Monaco have the dubious distinction of being pointed out at the top and bottom of this chart.