Sponsored by two dictators and owned by a dictatorship. Newcastle had a net spend of over £171m this season and they chop up journalists. Not sure they should be expected to be below West Ham.
I contend that the angst is that when windows of opportunity have opened to seriously "punch above your weight" for long-term effect, Levy appears to mess up (2011-2012 transfer windows, hiring Portu-ball managers etc) in a manner that has costs that spread over several seasons later on.
I mean the wealthiest club in the world are currently in second, which also demonstrates how vapid the Top Trumps approach to club finances is
A) The season isn't even over B) Our competence can't be measured by the performance of others. The data shows that we've been outperforming our financial status for the last ten years at least. There are only two possible explanations of this....the footballing side is well run, or (as suggested by @Dier Hard ) it's all down to Harry Kane.
A) Give it a few weeks and we'll be celebrating the first St Totteringham's Day in 6 years. In fact I'll go out on a limb here and predict right here that we won't get more than 15 points from the remaining 24. I've rarely wanted a season to finish as much as I do now. The football has been abysmal from the off and the club is in disarray at the moment. B) Data, like all statistics, is entirely arbitrary and any analysis depends entirely on when your starting point is. Taking a ten year slice will indeed produce the results that suit your narrative, but a five year slice will show that we've actually slightly underperformed our financial status, with an average league ranking of 5.2. Finishing 4th this season (which I don't think we will manage) will pick us back to par for course. Any lower and we continue to underperform. If your argument is that 5 years isn't a large enough data sample, so be it. I don't agree.
See @PleaseNotPoll reply. It isn't a matter of opinion how much data you need to be statistically significant..it can be calculated. And 200 matches isn't enough. As for the 30 matches so far this season they are not enough to determine anything.
As I told you all the other week : Data begets measures. Measures beget statistics. Nothing "arbitrary" whatsoever in data. "Taking a ten year slice will indeed produce the results that suit your narrative, but a five year slice will show that we've actually slightly underperformed our financial status, with an average league ranking of 5.2." Analysis of increasingly larger time periods (when you can) is common practice. For starters, tis a means of assessing when/whether statistical robustness is achieved for a measure.
Bingo. Seriously though it’s worrying where we could’ve been if not for him this season. Surprised his back isn’t broken.
When you are at that level you live to score, and nothing will stand in your way (manager, quality of your team mates, fatigue etc) .
Results posted after 2017/18 was the last time Arsenal were above us in the Deloitte table, and that was only by £11m. The last significant difference was after 2016/17 when the table shows a gap of £127m in their favour. So we've been above them for the last 4 years running and essentially on par with them the year prior to that. We've underperformed, it's as simple as that. And we've played crap football along the way.
See my reply. PNP's point was incorrect. I'm not certain how many matches constitutes "enough", but what I do know is that a season is a sample of 38 games and it is possible for a team to be relegated as a result of incompetence during that "small" sample; an occurrence which I am sure we can agree will likely have ramifications for the next 200 games, possibly more. Historical data or financial position is irrelevant. Leicester are a great example of this principle. Their 304 games prior to this season, a significant data sample, indicates an average league position of 7th or 8th. This corresponds precisely with their current financial position. They are the 8th wealthiest PL club. Fast forward a mere 30 games and they teeter on the brink of relegation. The previous 8 seasons could be rendered irrelevant due to incompetence over a relatively small period (arguably the last 2-3 seasons).
In Leicester's case the incompetence goes back further than that, as FFP bit them hard on the backside last summer to the point they were only allowed to spend £3.5m without selling players to offset signings And how far does this incompetence go back? On the face of it, back to 2014 where they broke Championship FFP rules to get promoted and weren't really punished, so they continued in that mindset - which works when they receive massive bids for a Mahrez, Maguire or a Chilwell to keep the books balanced, but the summer of 2021 didn't have a bumper sale and that had a knock-on effect in 2022
You make a fair point. But I'd counter that perhaps their failure to secure just one more win in each of the two seasons they bottled 4th and finished 5th would have bridged the incompetence gap and then some. CL revenue two years running makes an enormous difference financially and they quite unexpectedly missed out on that, given that on both occasions they were essentially in the top 4 for the entire season. And therein lies the point: football is a game of such fine margins that it seems absurd to build arguments based on data samples or historical results stretching back over years or decades. Ultimately even the best laid plans can be scuppered by things that data, history and finances cannot mitigate for. Like losing your two best players to injury after a transfer window has already closed, or a senior club official or coach departing for unforseen personal reasons. This is why at this level competence needs to be maintained year by year. A club cannot take a brief 2-3 year 'competence hiatus' and expect everything to be fine just because once upon a time they used to be alpha. That is exactly what happened to United post Fergie and they are only now, fully a decade plus later, starting to piece things together again. And I fear it has happened to us. We've been sleeping with our eyes open while Arsenal overtook us and Newcastle became the latest doped club, which means whereas 5 years ago our status as a top 4 club was assured even with symptoms of extreme incompetence (e.g. relying on a pivot of Winks-Sissoko and using a broken Rose and Wanyama all too regularly), the margins are now so much finer and the competition so much stiffer. Which means we could get every decision right next season and it won't matter one iota. We'd need at least 3 out of 6 other teams to have relatively incompetent seasons.
Deloitte's 2020 report claims that's the first year that we overtook them: https://www2.deloitte.com/bg/en/pages/finance/articles/football-money-league-2020.html "Tottenham Hotspur are eighth, the club’s highest ever position, and have overtaken Arsenal and Chelsea to become London’s highest revenue generating club for the first time since 1996/97" So we've had higher revenue during the COVID years?
Yes I think that's correct. So 2020, 2021, 2022 and now 2023 all show us above them. That's four years as I said. We went above them after 18/19 due to CL revenue thanks to reaching the final and then stayed above them despite COVID due to another year of CL revenue and a smaller wage bill. 2019 they were above us but by pittance.
Yes. 2019-20 would have been due to CL money. 2020-21 would have been due to better operation (lower wage bills etc) , and I assume the revenue difference that season was small,.
You are completely missing the point. The reason clubs have poor periods may not be related to competence...it's much more likely to be random. You, and indeed most others on here, are calling for major changes in the way the club is run because you believe that we lack competence whereas the data shows nothing of the sort. Leicester is another good example. If they are about the eighth richest club, then their finishing position should average between eighth and ninth and be scattered around it by luck. That's exactly what is observed. I don't think there is any evidence I can see that any club has an edge or indeed a weakness in turning financial strength into league points. They are all doing about as well as you would expect. That's not a surprise because there isn't actually any way to get a lasting edge other than financially.
If performance is correlated to financial performance you would still expect the nth stringest club financially to finish worse than nth place on average. eg Man City would have to win the League every year to not underperform on that measure. I've changed my view slightly on the basis of the discussion. I now think the data doesn't support anything other than the null hypothesis. ie performance depends on financial strength and luck and nothing else.
Go away, and do a rank correlation for every season since 2009 (league placing vs revenue) . Calculate the average coefficient C across that period. As a "broad brush" test, if C = 0.8, a delta d = 0.8 * 20 = ~2. So a fair assumption would be that for each season, the Nth club by revenues finished in P = Nth +/- d th place. If P > N + d, the club has over-performed If P < N + d, the club has under-performed.
