Introduction

It is often said in the soccer or footballing world that the game is all about money now. A league that somewhat fits this narrative is the Premier League. The Premier League is, by many metrics, the biggest football league in the world. It is without a doubt the richest bringing in by far the most revenue of any football league in the world, 1.87 times that of the second richest league in the world, the German Bundesliga [1]. In a league surrounded by cash where money reigns supreme, how accurately can spending predict a season before it has even started? Across four different seasons, I took the predicted Premier League table of three of NBC Sports top Premier League pundits before each season started and compared those tables with a table made up of every Premier League teams player wage bill before the season started. How will Joe Prince-Wright, Nicholas Mendola, and Andy Edwards compare to cold hard cash?

What is the Premier League?

The Premier League is the highest level of professional football in England. To start, a Premier League table each season will consist of twenty teams, ranked first to last based on the amount of points accumulated throughout the season. A team will get three points for a win, one point for a draw, and zero points for a loss. Each team will play every other team twice, once at home, and once away, for a total of thirty eight games. After every team has played thirty eight games, the season is over and the team with most points wins the league and the three teams with the least amount of points are relegated to the second division for the next season. Replacing those three teams in the next season are the three best teams from the second division. An important thing to note is that broadcast revenue is directly related to where a team places in the league. So the higher a team places, the more money it makes.

What is a Player Wage Bill?

This one is quite simple, a player wage bill is the total amount of money a club pays every player on their roster across the space of a season.

How are the Pundit Predictions and Wage Bill Rankings Compared? Pt.1

I used two different methods of comparing the predicted tables of the pundits and the tables made up of wage bills ranked. The first method being the perfect predictions method and the second being the points system. The perfect predictions method is quite simple, it is based on whether or not a team at the end of the season placed exactly where they were predicted to place. For example, if Crystal Palace was predicted to place in twelfth before the season, and they finish in twelfth, that would count as a perfect prediction. I created a line graph where I tracked how many perfect predictions each pundit and the wage bill table got across four seasons.

There is no clear conclusion from this graph so I averaged out each the wage bill table and each pundit’s amount of perfect predictions per season. I then put these averages into a bar graph.

The wage bill table had more perfect predictions on average than two out of the the three pundits, and the same average as the third one. Although performing well, the wage bill table predictions barely outperformed the pundits in the perfect predictions category so it is hard to draw any significant conclusion on what is a better predictor. What if we looked at predictions from a different perspective though, would they yield different results?

How are the Pundit Predictions and Wage Bill Rankings Compared? Pt.2

The second system for comparing the accuracy of predictions is the points system. A bit more complicated than the perfect prediction system, the points system calculates the absolute value difference of where a team is predicted to finish versus where they actually finish. For example, if I predict Everton to finish tenth, and they finish fourteenth, I would get four points. The key to this system is the lesser points, the better. Similar to the perfect predictions line graph, I created one for the points system.

When looking at the graph, it seems quite apparent that the wage bill table scored fewer points on average when compared with the pundits meaning its predictions are more accurate. Although, because these graphs can be misleading I made a bar graph of the averages just in case.

When looking at the bar graph, it is clear that the wage bill table did perform significantly better than all the pundits. The wage bill table averaged a score of 51.5 across the four seasons while the best score out of all three pundits was a 57.0. The other two pundits each scored a 60.0 and a 59.5 respectively.

Conclusion

To conclude, I think it is fair to say that money can at least predict the Premier League table just as well as the experts of football can. One could argue based on the evidence of these graphs that money can predict the Premier League table better and they would have a decent case. However, with only four seasons of complete data around the subject to work with, and a difference that although noticeable, isn’t drastic, I don’t think it is fair to say that money is a better predictor of a Premier League season than the pundits.

Citations:

[1] Revenue of the Big Five soccer leagues in Europe from 2012/13 to 2021/22, with a forecast to 2023/24, by league [2] EPL Team Payroll Tracker Predictions for Premier League 2021-22 standings [3] Predictions for Premier League 2020-21 standings [4] Predictions for Premier League 2019-20 standings [5] Predictions for Premier League 2018-19 standings [6] Premier League Standings